31 Days of Short Reviews #2: Renaud Dillies

Renaud Dillies' Betty Blues, like his previous Bubbles and Gondola, is a book about the difficulties of being an artist. Whereas the first book was about the crippling fear that can cause writer's block, Betty Blues is about the ways in which being an artist can disrupt one's personal life. At the same time, the book is about the ways in which being in a relationship with an artist can lead to long periods of being neglected, of being a widow to whatever calling obsesses one's lover. Of course, he does this in his trademark ultra-cute, anthropomorphic but densely-rendered style. Certainly, there are comic moments in the book and even a few pages of sight gags and kinetic physical humor, but the tone of the book is immediately downbeat and doesn't resolve in a cliched or expected fashion. To the English-language publisher NBM's credit, this book is published at close to the original album's size, giving the denseness of those pages some room to breathe.

Rice, the jazz trumpeter who's one of the book's protagonists, immediately quits playing when he realizes that his girlfriend, Betty, leaves him at the bar at which he's performing with a rich guy who bought her a case of champagne. The book begins with Betty at her breaking point, as Rice is at the peak of his playing powers and putting on a spectacular performance. For her, it's the culmination of hours of being ignored at the expense of practice and playing. When a smooth-talking man actually pays attention to the already-inebriated Betty, she leaves with him as much as a sign of protest than an actual desire to be with the guy. What follows are a series of adventures for each of them, where a down-and-out Rice drifts as far away from possible from Betty and music while she is seduced by living in luxury. Of course, both realize that neither of these roles suits them or is making them happy. Rice realizes that playing is as necessary to him as breathing (and I'm guessing that this is another autobiographical turn by Dillies) and Betty realizes that luxury is less important than respect and authenticity. The ending is left ambiguous, but the general message is precisely the same as Bubbles and Gondola: beauty hurts, but it's the only thing that matters. Dillies seems incapable of drawing anything less than the cutest of characters on every page; while this was unbearably twee in books he just illustrated (like Abelard), it actually works in this book. One feels for these charming, sad characters in a way that a more realistic depiction would have made impossible to stomach. The cuteness of the drawings dampens the book's more melodramatic and melancholic tendencies, while the downbeat story is lightened by the character work. It's an unstable kind of alchemy, but Dillies' key decision not to slap on a happy ending makes it work.The brevity of the story (just 78 pages, with several of them chapter-bridging illustrations) also goes a long way in letting the intense charm of Dillies' renderings remain pleasant rather than cloying.

NBM Spotlight: Abelard, An Enchantment, The Initiates

Abelard, by Renaud Dillies and Regis Hautierre.  This is a deeply problematic story about the quest of an innocent and the tragedies that pile up along the way. It follows an anthropomorphic chick named Abelard who happens to spy a beautiful girl named Eppily. When he fails to woo her with a flower, a fox sardonically suggests that he try to give her the moon or the stars. From there, the astoundingly naive Abelard goes on a series of adventures in order to go to America and get a flying machine so as to go to the moon. How much one enjoys the story depends on how long one can stay sympathetic toward Abelard, who is really a walking punching bag of a character. Guided by little other than the aphorisms that pop out of his calculatedly cute oversize hat, he makes friends in some quarters (including gypsies straight out of central casting), enemies in others, and eventually a reluctant friend in a bear who was in love with Eppily as a younger man.

Let's go over some of the problems I have with the book. The nature of the attraction between Abelard and Eppily is infantile and on the surface. Building a book's worth of agency on that alone was a bit much to swallow, because Abelard had very little presence or agency as a character other than that single desire, which reduced her to a simple objectification. Indeed, several characters talk about her (in a mostly disparaging fashion), but we never really have a clue as to who she is or why she does what she does, which is the fate of all the women in this book. Even though the artist comment on the absence of women in the marsh were Abelard was born and poke fun at the misogyny of the characters there, their representation in the book isn't much better. Dillies is an incredibly talented artist who makes the most of the material here, but even he turns up the cute a bit too much in the face of increasingly-cliched sentimentality that begins to build up as Abelard's quest becomes increasingly doomed. Indeed, the "magic" of the ending depended entirely on how sad one was to see Abelard meet his eventual fate, and the only thing I was sad about was how he couldn't find comfort in the moment (a running theme in the book) and be satisfied with that. He let himself be battered by fate, and his outcome was inevitable. As a result, I found him an entirely unsympathetic character, and worse still, an incredibly dull one to pin a whole narrative around. Hautiere and Dillies were going for a fairy tale and lost all sense of restraint as storytellers, and the ensuing mix of cruelty and sentiment was difficult to swallow.

An Enchantment, by Christian Durieux. Labeled "a graphic poem" by the author, this book is the latest in a series of comics set in Paris' Louvre. The plot, such as it is, is simple. The director of the museum is ill and a party is held in his honor to celebrate his retirement. The cantankerous old man has other plans, slipping out of the party with a couple of bottles of red wine and a secret plan to perhaps kill himself and cause all sorts of mischief in that manner. In the halls of his beloved Louvre, he encounters a beautiful young woman who seems invisible to the guards, and they run off and engage in all sorts of hijinks. At the end of the book, she leads him into her home: a painting by Antoine Watteau, where they will forever embark on a journey to Aphrodite's island. It was not hard to see this coming, as the nameless young woman was clearly either part of a painting or else an angel of death; it may well be that she was both.

The story is not the thing, here, though. This is a love-letter to the Louvre, a dance between a man who loves it more than anyone and the only one who could be a proper partner: a subject from one of the paintings personifying youth. Durieux is an astonishing craftsman, but it's his ability to make his characters come alive that makes this such a deeply affecting book. The reader can't help but feel for the old man, surrounded by beauty but with so little time to go. The presence of the woman is a kind of elixir vitae, a powerful but temporary reprieve from the ravages of age. She's playful and flirty but also enigmatic and unpredictable, all qualities the old man didn't know he needed to experience until the end. As they progress through the museum and trade pithy quotes, the pair celebrates what is great about the Louvre and art in general. The panels where famous poses from paintings are recreated are funny and clever. Indeed, the lightness of this book's mood in the face of potentially maudlin storytelling decisions is to its credit. The book is the best kind of party, celebrated by a man looking to go out his way and the ghosts of a building that treasured him as much as he treasured the works themselves. This is a beautiful and even lyrical tribute to those who go above and beyond the call of duty with regard to art.

The Initiates, by .Etienne Davodeau. This is an extended process project that takes its time delving into its two subjects, attempting to connect the two and expounding upon the philosophy of each subject. In this case, the two subjects are wine-making and comics. Davodeau is a French cartoonist who approached the vintner Richard Leroy with a proposition: he would spend time with him in order to understand everything that went into making wine, and in return Davodeau would teach him about the world of comics. This is an inside baseball kind of book, the sort that only a reader who is fascinated by arcane details and the arguments related to them could love. Davodeau spends a full year with Leroy, a vintner whose philosophy of wine-making gives him a surprising amount in common with the cartoonist.

That's because he favors biodynamic farming, an approach based on the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. The philosopher and educator's theory informs Waldorf school education today, and its heart lies in the idea that in order to thrive, develop and learn, we must be as close to the earth and its processes as possible. For Leroy, this means pruning his grape vines by hand over a period of three months. It means spraying with very light manure and silica sprays instead of using chemical sprays. It means using almost no sulfur in fermenting his wines. Above all else, it means that his communion with the soil, the plants and the wine-making process gives his wines his own personal signature: the wines are his expression. It's a level of individual craftsmanship not unlike a cartoonist going to a drawing board and spending long, lonely months and deven years drawing stories. The results in both cases are enjoyed by a relatively select few, but the devotees are truly devoted.

For the most part, I thought the sections of the book that focused on wine-making to be far superior to the sections where Davodeau takes Leroy to meet a cartoonist or attend a comics festival. The fact is that, especially in the beginning, Leroy is not an especially adventurous or bold reader. Some of Davodeau's choices seemed a bit odd as well (giving Watchmen to someone with no experience of reading superhero comics was ill-advised). I did enjoy little touches like Leroy wondering why Lewis Trondheim drew himself as a bird with a beak rather than as a person, only to have Davodeau have Trondheim draw a one-page comic answering that very question! What was clear was that Leroy respected the passion and dedication of the cartoonist, especially since he came to wine-making late in life. Like making comics, it's less a profession than a calling; one realizes that it's what one must do. Davodeau's drawing is conventional and realistic with the slightly cartoony quality of most French cartoonists. The grey wash gives it a neutral quality that places the emphasis of the book on the content rather than the drawings themselves, which almost entirely eschew any sense of decorative quality. It's an interesting book that draws some intriguing connections, but it stops short of really delving into any of these ideas at length. Instead, the focus is on what the two men do, how they do it, and some thoughts on why they do it. It's up to the reader to draw any further conclusions.

Chasing Inspiration: Bubbles and Gondola

Bubbles and Gondola (NBM) is an odd little book.At its essence, it's a book about writing, or rather, a book about inspiration. Artist Renaud Dillies poses an interesting idea in the course of this story about a mouse named Charlie: inspiration is sometimes scary, a thing to be avoided. Writer's block is a result of fear as much as it is a lack of ideas. Over the course of the book, Charlie (a writer), comes face to face with the emissary of Solitude, a bird who offers him all sorts of helpful advice. Charlie is alone in order to work, but the solitude of the desk and his fear of inspiration causes him to constantly waste time. His feeble attempts at writing all end up on the trash heap, the result of being on the titular gondola ride that simply circles around and around. Charlie shares a meal with his family, attends a carnival, winds up playing in a band at a bar and throws back a few as he battles this vertigo. Despite the whimsical drawing and fanciful setting, one can't help but feel that this is an intensely personal book for Dillies. This isn't simply a book about writer's block, but about a specific kind of aspiration and the blocks against that aspiration.

Later in the book, Charlie talks to a city worker that the the lights he put up for the carnival are beautiful things that inspire happiness, if only for a brief moment. He compares it to a child blowing bubbles, to "make things prettier, and ultimately more bearable". He's getting at the existential purpose for creating art: to make things that inspire that sort of feeling in others. It's an awesome, terrifying responsibility if one thinks too much about the effect and less about the process of creation. It gets back to Lynda Barry's invocation of the two questions that destroy creativity: "Is this good? Does this suck?" An artist cannot think about the impact of a potential work and create at the same time, and that gets to the heart of this book. That theme is carried out with a falling motif: Charlie is afraid to fall and afraid of heights, and is constantly put in that position in this book. When he finally drunkenly falls from a lamp post and then later drops a beloved coffee mug, the impact of both events frees him. In a sense, the ship painted on the side of the coffee mug is now freed from his own imagination, which allows him to free his own imagination and start to write.

Dillies' anthropomorphic style feels quite familiar, mixing George Herriman with contemporaries like Lewis Trondheim. The cute, whimsical nature of his drawings is given weight with page after page of dense hatching and cross-hatching. The book's muted color pattern also reminds me a bit of reading a children's fairy tale book of some kind, an idea further advanced with several dream-like sequences. I thought the art acted as a counter to the intense nature of Charlie's struggle; the cuteness of the characters belies their sense of pain, just as it's impossible to immediately detect emotional anguish in someone at first glance in real life. The fantasy sequences further serve to deflect Charlie's angst, even as Dillies circles closer and closer as to why his mouse is suffering from writer's block. It's difficult and even painful at times to create something beautiful, especially when the artist spends a lot of time trying to figure out if something they create is beautiful as they're creating it. The answers to the two questions must always be made by others, which is both incredibly difficult to swallow and the only way an artist can be productive. Dillies suggests that embracing fear is the only way to overcome it and reach back to the simple feeling of being a child blowing a bubble--or scrawling something on a piece of paper.