by matthias wivel & friends
Den her har vi længe taget tilløb til, for det er virkelig en af de store: Moebius Major Fatal, eller Jerry Cornelius’ Hermetiske Garagge, eller slet og ret ‘Garagen’. Vi fik endelig indspillet på et tidspunkt hvor vi kort var i samme tid og på samme sted og her er vores tanker i al deres rodede vælde. Vendingerne ‘fuuuuck’ og ‘groteskt fedt’ bliver brugt lidt oftere end normalt… Lyt!
I fredagens bogtillæg til Information, og på nettet, kan man læse min anmeldelse af Cobolts to nys udgivne samlebind af de tidlige album i Jean-Michel Charlier og Jean “Moebius” Girauds westernklassiker Blueberry.
Hermed et uddrag:
Hjertet er på rette sted, men helt fri af stereotypen går Charlier og Giraud ikke – indianerne omtaler sig selv i tredje person og råber i flæng »Hooka hey!«, når de angriber. Det er i den sammenhæng interessant at opleve den unge Blueberrys fordomsfulde blik på dem: ligesom alle sine hvide frænder omtaler han dem som »røde djævle«, »feje hunde« og lignende.
Dette kan virke overraskende hos en mand, som vi forstår indrullerede sig i Unionshæren i Borgerkrigen, til trods for at han hidrørte fra Syden, fordi han ikke kunne tolerere slaveriet (i øvrigt et af de mest markante blinde punkter i serien som helhed).
Samtidig er det interessant hos en helt, der, som læsere af seriens senere album vil vide, ender med at blive indlemmet i en navajostamme. Det er imidlertid et vigtigt greb, både fordi det umiddelbart forankrer Blueberry i sin tids virkelighed og på den længere bane viser, at han er en person under udvikling.
Læs det hele her, hvis du har betalt.
For the past three weeks, the Danish comics site has been remembering comics legend Jean Giraud/Moebius’ passing with articles, essays, reminiscences from a number of Danish creators, and — most interesting to a non-Danish reading audience: drawn homages. Go here for a panoply of drawings on “The Theme” by Denmark’s finest.
Above is Jan Solheim, below Christian Højgaard reinterprets the last page of The Hermetic Garage.
The week in review
The passing of Jean Giraud is the passing of one of the great cartoonists and visual artists of his generation. It had become easy to take the enormously productive artist for granted, even to bore of him, what with him performing well below his own best a lot of the time in the last couple of decades, but it should not be forgotten that this was somebody who generously gave of his vision of the world, making it his through his drawing and storytelling, and ever-so-subtly affecting our common visual imaginary. His was a quiet ubiquity of a kind that only few artists could ever hope to reach. He shall be missed.
The snap above was taken at the Angoulême train station on the Sunday of the festival in 2006, reading the already seminal Kramers Ergot 4. F-R-E-S-H.
Here are some Giraud/Moebius links:
Earlier today I posted an appreciation of the late Moebius’ last great work, Le Chasseur déprime, over at Hooded Utilitarian. Reading that book in the light of his illness and death suddenly seemed to make a lot of sense. It is among his most profound, questioning works — a fitting artistic testament from somebody who changed our way of seeing. Go check it out.
Raphael’s Portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici
The Metabunker summarizes the problems of attribution surrounding the Raphael portrait sold at Christie’s in 2007
Interview: El-P & Aesop Rock
Click here to read our 2003 in-depth interview with two of New York’s finest.
Continuous Creation — Titian’s Nuova Natura
On Titian’s aesthetic of the unfinished and Renaissance notions of the subjective.
Bleed Runner
On Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Also, read producer Charles de Lauzirika’s comments here.
Hergé and the Order of Things
Hooded Utilitarian column on Hergé’s vision and the necessity of comics criticism that engages deep form
Bruegel, Rembrandt, Crumb and Cartooning
Extended Hooded Utilitarian piece on R. Crumb’s Genesis and the cartoon tradition.
New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity
A deadening force at the heart of the art form, smothering the field in bourgeois mediocrity
Hogarth’s Chicken Fat
An analysis of Hogarth’s rich imagery as both support and counterpoint to his storytelling
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The Constant Garage
The following essay was originally written for, and published in, The Comics Journal #300 in 2009, as a special instalment of my Euro-Comics column “Continental Drift”; it was subsequently published on TCJ.com, but on a particular iteration of that website which is no longer online. I therefore now reprint it here in minimally edited form, on the occasion of our recent episode of Radio Rackham on Moebius’ Hermetic Garage.
Spanning more or less exactly the life of the Journal, Moebius’ greatest invention, the Hermetic Garage, has been a constant in his creative life. A set of concepts to which he has returned intermittently through his career and which has found new life in his most recent book—an exhilarating return to form. Continue reading ‘The Constant Garage’