Blending in with the locals
Of course, just when I kvetch about having difficulty finding what I want in comics, I immediately get smacked in the face by something amazing: The Incal. I’m still early on in the graphic novel, but so far it’s making a serious bid for being an immediate favourite. It’s a French comic which ran through the 80s, and along with Valerian it’s making a strong case for the Gallic contribution to sequential art.
American comics can often feel extremely bifurcated. You have your superheroes on the one hand, and then on the other hand you have a lot of books aiming to be the graphic equivalent of the highbrow literary novel: Maus, Epileptic, Fun Home, Jimmy Corrigan etc. This is an oversimplification (you have the various indie comics, for instance), but it maps pretty well onto what I see dominating the bookshelves. I find it a bit frustrating, because I am admittedly not much of a superhero guy, and I also think that there’s more to “serious” literature than literary realism, memoirs, biographies and whatnot.
What makes French comics so intriguing is that this binary doesn’t seem to exist in the same way. Admittedly I don’t know much of their history and am drawing from a small sample size. But what’s refreshing about Valerian is that it’s unabashedly populist genre fiction that isn’t operating within, or responding to, the tradition of superhero comics; rather, it’s trying to translate the tradition of literary science fiction into graphic format, and doesn’t really feel fettered by assumptions of what a comic should be. The latter is doubly true of The Incal, which is…well, we’ll just say unique.
All this is abetted by the formal characteristics of French comics, which, compared to American and Japanese comics, puts an extreme emphasis on environments. The characters never feel like they’re situated against a background – rather, the setting itself is a character in its own right. This also, along with their relative scarcity in North America, makes them a wee bit pricey, but so far I’ve found it to be worth the cost.
Said scarcity also makes it a bit difficult to get a handle on them, because you’re primarily getting the Big Names. Akira, for instance, is one of the most important manga ever, but it’s not terribly representative of manga as a whole.
Anyway, I’ll probably save writing about the Incal until I’ve actually finished it. It’s too early to give a real opinion.
Advertisements Share this:
