With his airs of a little brown bear, his good innocent face, his fur with warm reflections and his strange cubic poops (science focused on the phenomenon), the wombat would make an excellent comic book hero. Thanks to Manu Larcenet, it is now a reality – or almost. Challenged by a typo in an article in “Obs” which transformed “Ordinary Combat”, one of his major works, into “Ordinary Vombat”, the famous designer had fun imagining what such a work would look like. An Italian format book, subtitled “A comic to gnaw on (even though the wombat isn’t a rodent.) (I checked.)”.
Us, it reminds us of “Francis, joker badger” by Claire & Jake, this spindly little animal who finds himself in the most catastrophic situations (ranging from a nuclear war to a simple adultery) and who, for all that, does not don’t finish “Walking in the countryside”. But perhaps Larcenet’s marsupial would have more existential problems, like Marco, the young photographer at the center of “Ordinary Combat”? An idea like this: exhausted by the city and the concrete, a wombat tries to evacuate his neuroses through psychoanalysis sessions, without success. When he meets a female wombat, he hesitates to commit. But the aphorisms of a hermit make him ponder… In 2008, the author of comics announced to stop the series because he had “nothing more to say”. Let’s bet that this happy error of the “Obs” will be able to revive it.
The sequel after the ad
“Contemplation of the world”
“The Ordinary Combat”, prize for best album at the Angoulême festival in 2004 and adapted to the cinema in 2015, was a phenomenon and remains an essential part of any comic book library. Manu Larcenet has published around forty comics and series, including “Le Retour à la terre”, strips scripted by Ferri featuring neo-rurals whose “Manu Larssinet” ; “Blast”, a masterpiece of darkness or “Brodeck’s Report”.
Manu Larcenet, back to “Return to Earth”
Saturday April 22, he received, at the Paris Book Festival, the first Gotlib prize for comics, for the third volume of “Group Therapy” (Dargaud). Despite the subtitle “Sadness will always last” according to Van Gogh’s last words on his deathbed, this meta album is very funny. We follow Jean-Eudes de Cageot-Goujon, formerly known as “Manu Larcenet, star of the bédé”who, suffering from a lack of inspiration, intends to devote his time to “contemplation of the world”. This is an opportunity for Larcenet, who has distinguished himself in his career in both humor and drama, to multiply with virtuosity the tributes (or the parodies, it depends): the rhythm of the gags of Fabcaro, the venous metamorphoses of Katsuhiro Ōtomo or the tight drawings of Julie Doucet.
That said in passing, “Group Therapy” won out, in particular against “A General, Generals” (Le Lombard), which had its own unusual news: being the winner of the Galons de la BD, a prize awarded by the Ministry of Armies (which screenwriter Nicolas Juncker refused). The Gotlib prize has just been created by Ariane Gotlieb, daughter of. She chaired the jury made up of musicians Eddy Mitchell, Richard Gotainer and Thomas Dutronc, actors and directors Alain Chabat, Antoine de Caunes and Albert Dupontel, writer Clara Dupont-Monod and comic book authors Zep and Catherine Meurisse. While we can only welcome the initiative to reward the“fun, humor, derision, ilarity and all that sort of thing” as they say at AUDIE, the publisher of “Fluide Glacial” where the master officiated, we regret all the same that no designer could find a place among the nominees.
group therapy, by Manu Larcenet, Dargaud, 56 p., 16 euros.
