What can I remember from the year 2021 in comic books? The selection of the "World"

Les journalistes du « Monde » qui écrivent sur la bande dessinée ont élaboré une sélection de leurs albums préférés parmi ceux parus au cours de l’année 2021. Une liste de 25 titres qu’il n’est pas interdit d’envisager offrir à l’occasion des fêtes de fin d’année.

The choice of Alexis Duval

"René.E with sleeping woods ", from Elene Usdin

One of the most confusing and most beautiful albums of the year, the story of a hypersensitive little boy who has lost his plush rabbit.Let it not be mistaken: under childish attire hides an aesthetic and political whimsical, whose meanders are not without evoking Alice in Wonderland.The journey to which Elene Usdin invites is an awakening reverie, tinged with ecological and social progressivism, which addresses transidentity through transgression and transcendence.The drawing, of a dizzying beauty, has a lot in the immense success of this work in every point.

Adrien Le Gal's choices

"Hong Kong, a fallen city", by Kwong-Shing Lau

The story is freezing and absolutely essential: Kwong-Shing Lau, raised in Japan, has to return to China when his father loses his work.Victim, for years, of the racism of his comrades and his teachers, he moved to Hong Kong, a haved of tolerance, openness and democracy.Until in 2019, Beijing's repression fell on the city.Beyond a perfectly mastered graphics, between the manga and the graphic novel, the album upset by the reality it describes: that of a people gradually deprived of all their freedoms and plunged into an Orwellian dictatorship, high-Tech and relentless.

"A familiar face", by Michael Deforge

What if, like our smartphones, the universe regularly imposed updates to us, in order to optimize our human experience against our will?Daily, we would discover a new body, a new apartment, new neighbors, a new itinerary to go to work ... and in case of brutal celibacy, we could order a roommate, certainly expensive, but chosen with a computer to answerprecisely to our needs.Faced with this absurd and falsely listening system, is there a place for love, hatred, revolt?Without answering the question, Michael Deforge delivers a scary and jubilant dystopia, served by a graphics under acid.

The choice of Brune Mauger

"Des Vivants", by Raphaël Meltz, Louise Moaty and Simon Roussin

Who remembers the network of the Museum of Man?These ethnologists are nevertheless among the very first resistance fighters in occupied France.In June 1940, they decided to go underground and were quickly joined by nuns, a garage woman, a lawyer or a retired colonel.Together, they create a newspaper and organize evacuations of prisoners, passages to England or the free zone, while being closely monitored by the Gestapo and its auxiliaries.This ultra-realistic story is that of an original graphic novel, which is based on serious archive work: letters, investigative minutes, telephone interviews, newspapers were peeled by Raphaël Meltz and Louise Moaty.The designer Simon Roussin was able to restore the heavy and scary atmosphere of the time and bring back, with elegance, to these men and women gradually fallen into oblivion.

The choices of Cédric Pietrapurunga

"Alicia, Prima Ballerina Assoluta", by Eileen Hofer and Mayalen Goust

She was the Castro star.Died in 2019, at the age of 98, Alicia Alonso was a living legend for the Cubans.Intended for a classic international career - her interpretation in Giselle made her reputation -, the young dancer saw her destiny upset by the Castor Revolution.Eager to educate the people, the new power made ballerina and their company, the Cuba Nacional ballet, a propaganda instrument.Alicia Alonso did not let it count, taking advantage of the support of the Castro to build an empire on the island and train generations of dancers with envied technique.Even an early blindness did not prevent the star from dancing and continuing his work.

To tell this extraordinary destiny, the Swiss filmmaker Eileen Hofer, already author in 2015 of a documentary on Alicia Alonso (horizontes), had the good idea to make two eras cross and two destinies: on the one hand the ascentFrom the prima ballerina assolved in the post-war period, on the other, the efforts of a young dancer who dreams of imitating her idol in today's Havana.A skillful way to mix political and aesthetic considerations.Beyond the historical interest, the album also seduces with the very gentle drawing of the author youth Mayalen Goust (Les Colombes du Roi-Sun, Kamarades).Some boards are real paintings.

"White around", by Wilfrid Lupano and Stéphane Fert

Do not trust the poetic drawing of Stéphane Fert.The little -known but truthful story that white tells around - what a title!- is tragic.We are in 1832 in Canterbury, in the abolitionist Connecticut.A teacher in a school of young girls, Prudence Crandall welcomes a black student for the first time in her class.But the initiative turns off the small white town.A year earlier, a revolt led in the south by a literate slave called Nat Turner traumatized America.Giving the instruction to blacks is dangerous, consider the local notables, who demand the departure of the child.But this is not about the teacher, who decides, in response to hostility, to reserve her school for African-American girls.

Skillfully conducted, Wilfrid Lupano's scenario takes the reader in the Crandall prudence fight for the right to instruction.And he recalls that the greatest changes often start with small seeds planted here and there in a classroom.

"Marathon", by Nicolas Debon

This is the story of a race. That of the 1928 Olympic Games Marathon in Amsterdam. Still tested by the Boucherie de la Great War, the greatest nations sent their best athletes there. There are the Americans, "the best treated, the best shoes, the best fed", the English, the "most solid game" team, but also the Japanese, "determined and formidable athletes", the Italians "De Mussolini", the Germans "excluded from the games since the armistice" ... And then, there is France, with his heterogeneous team and his "little Arab", Boughéra El Ouafi, worker at Renault Billancourt in the civilian and that No one sees going very far. Two hours, thirty-two minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, it is him, "the little mechanic that we did not notice", the child of Ouled Djellal (Algeria), who crosses the line first Arrival of Olympisch Stadion. A suprise. A triumph.

To revive this story chased from our memories, Nicolas Debon has decided to dive his reader in the heart of the race.Page after page, we follow the athletes over the kilometers, we suffer with them in the wind of the polders, we ignite when they go up competitors, we worry when they approach the "wall" of the 30 kilometers ... we do notknows nothing about what happened before the race.We won't know anything about what happened afterwards.But the story keeps in suspense until the end, served by a sepia color drawing, which plunges the reader into the atmosphere of the time.The album ends with a few documentary pages, useful for those who want to (re) discover the story of El Ouafi, the "forgotten athlete", which was excluded by the French Athletics Federation two years after its Olympic featand died in indifference in 1959.

"Mademoiselle Baudelaire", from Yslaire

Le 200^e anniversaire de la naissance de Charles Baudelaire, fêté le 9 avril, a donné lieu à la publication de nombreux ouvrages. Celui que lui consacre le Belge Yslaire sort indéniablement du lot. Par son parti pris, d’abord. Plutôt que de s’en tenir à une biographie classique, l’auteur de la série des Sambre a décidé d’évoquer le poète à travers sa relation avec Jeanne Duval, une mulâtresse créole aimée autant que maudite.

Nicknamed "La Venus Noire", we know almost nothing about her.Only a few portraits drawn by Baudelaire, letters where he talks about her to her mother attest to her existence.However, the muse accompanied the sulphurous dandy throughout his life, fleeing with him the usurers, sharing the syphilis which will eventually kill the poet, at only 49 years old.Jeanne Duval inspired several poems of the Flowers of Evil, including the famous Dance Serpent, a reflection of the fascination of Baudelaire for her terrible mistress.

To trace this extraordinary destiny, Yslaire himself says having entered "a second state", leaving her brush and her pencils to guide him.A trance that gives his drawing a release never reached.In moments, the author seems to fuck the paper like the poet the words.Some boxes are barely sketched, other saturated with hatching.Sex is also omnipresent, like the verses of the cursed poet.We come out of the reading of this imposing work - 160 pages -, but with the feeling of having met a work and an author.

"Asphalt Blues", by Jaouen Salaün

They loved each other, torn and then found.Marked by a childhood in which he was placed as a foster family, Mick has trouble finding his place in this destroyed world.His indecision weighs on Nina, who wants to move forward and can no longer wait for her.So, everyone leaves on their own, before meeting again, thirteen years later ... But can we start everything again?Love and stay free at the same time?More than the scenario, after all quite classic, it is the graphics developed by Jaouen Salaün, designer passed by the Fine Arts of Nîmes and the Emile-Cohl School of Lyon, which seduces in this voluminous album.Framing, cutting, light, colors, everything is perfect cinematography.When the graphic palette is controlled at this point, it is a treat.

"47 strings", by Timothé le Boucher

And to say that he is only 33 years old.Author of the already very noticed these days which disappear (Glénat, 2017), Timothé Le Boucher still raises a little more his level, with this fantastic story of seduction-repulsion between a metamorphic singer who does not like to be resisted and aYoung asocial harpist in need of recognition.Disturbing, disturbing but also devilishly attractive, the album is reminiscent of the universe of the Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, especially in his Orgian scenes.A skilful synthesis of Franco-Belgian style and manga, the drawing unfolds in majesty on almost 400 pages, without leaving a second of respite to the reader.

The choices of Frédéric Potet

"Noise in the sky", by David Prudhomme

Not everyone had the chance to grow in Grangeroux, a place of the surroundings of Châteauroux, which has become a peri-urban area provided in circles and pavilions.David Prudhomme, if.The designer has doubled the still delicate exercise in the autobiography of an almost sociological examination of his original environment, located at an inner lifting of an old NATO military base.

Between 1951 and 1967, some 8,000 US Army soldiers lived on the spot, transforming Châteauroux into a small corner of America.The soldiers left, the base airport would then become the subject of amazing lusts.Cargos from Iraq will take off there to transport weapons of war;prototypes of civil aviation (Concorde, A380 ...) will train there, at the cost of a hellish barrier;A consortium of Chinese companies, finally, will eye on the site with the idea of installing assembly units.

Full of portraits of raw people, in particular the two grandfathers of the author and an original hat nicknamed the "sheriff", noise in the sky tells the peripheral France of the last forty years, confronted with globalization andissues that go beyond it.Kid of generosity, the album makes the intimate and the global converge.The sweetness of a lead mine is only strengthening empathy.

"Look, Jolie Marcia", by Marcello Quintanilha

Relentless columnist of Brazilian society, Marcello Quintanilha (tungsten, glass talc) delivers a new story mixing earthy and gravity, its trademark.Her heroine, Marcia, a nurse in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, is faced with a neighborhood gang with whom her daughter Jaqueline, a young casual woman with a well hanged language, recklessly frozen.To the picturesque scenes of life in a favela, the author annexes a dramatic construction on the theme of daily violence, through the actions of an armed militia supposed to protect the inhabitants.We laugh, we cry when reading this amazing graphic object, illuminated with carnival colors that accentuate the hiatus between comedy and tragedy.

" #I accuse… !», By Jean Dytar

Et si l’affaire Dreyfus se déroulait aujourd’hui ? Quel traitement en feraient les médias actuels – réseaux sociaux, chaînes d’information en continu et autres ? Jean Dytar offre une plongée aussi anachronique que vertigineuse dans la crise qui fractura la société française à la fin du XIX^e siècle et au début du suivant. Objet hors-norme de 300 pages en format italien, #J’accuse… ! reprend, à la lettre, les écrits et les paroles les plus symptomatiques de l’affaire, dans une mise en scène composée de tweets, de « like », de hashtags, d’interviews, de fake news, de pétitions en ligne, de débats en direct – le tout dessiné dans le style de l’époque, à grand renfort de hachures.

The procession of hatred and violence having raged between the conviction of Captain Dreyfus (1894) and his liberation (1899) refers to the media excitement which takes hold of certain contemporary affairs, hysteria as a bonus.A big hour is necessary to read this amazing graphic documentary, which a digital extension enriches, made of biographical and facsimile notes of the sources cited.

"A summer", by Alessandro Tot

If the comic strip often borrows from the cinema, it will be said of Alessandro Tota that it has merge and chained two sides far from burlesque humor on the big screen: that of the Italian comedy of the 1950s and that of the crazy VeryBad Trip (2009).It is indeed in a very bad "trip" that Claudio is embarked after he responded to the advances of the young blueberry, crossed in a well -known bari park of drug addicts.The boy broke with his punk and marginal friends to spawn with the entourage of his girlfriend, perverse and hygienists who hardly carry him in their hearts.The impromptu confrontation of two worlds that everything separates will turn into the wild trip, against a background of hallucinogenic and class struggle.An astonishing red watercolor accentuates the frosty character of this earthy study of characters.

"On the track", by Henry McCausland

We know, since Winsor McCay (1867-1934), that comics offers infinite narrative potential. For his first album, the British painter and illustrator Henry McCausland makes allegiance to the creator of Little Nemo to transcribe dreams - his family, without absolute formal freedom. Unlike McCay whose boards played a lot on verticality, McCausland opted for horizontality, in this case that of a winding and endless athletics track on which a group of young runners has haste. Everyone is moved by a singular goal: to find lost cats, send a kite on the moon, create a mutual aid system, cajolate a magic poncho ... We would like to tell more about this dreamlike marathon and disjointed like the session of session psychoanalysis. "Do you think dreams make sense?" "Asks one of these unconscious runners. No, no more than this beautiful surreal exercise full of graphic inventions that borrow as much from Chris Ware's waffles as from the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Marey.

"The Moskova drum", by Simon Spruyt

By right, the challenge that would have consisted in adapting war and peace in comics, the Belgian illustrator Simon Spruyt focused on a secondary character from the masterpiece of Léon Tolstoy (1828-1910): the drumFrench Vincent Bosse, a 20 -year -old conscript, embarked in spite of himself in the Russian campaign of 1812.

Behind the fighting because of his angel mouth, the young ingenuated will however be at the forefront of the great Napoleonic rout, from taking Moscow to Smolensk.Remaining to live in Borodino, where he founded a family, the one who now lives a datcha and the rabougri body of an old man replayed the great story of his youth to a visitor intrigued by this epic, whose designer manages to reconstruct the epic breath.

Served by a luminous watercolor with a thick grain from which emerges the pale face of the hero, his graphic novel revives Tolstoy's pen, while evoking Candide de Voltaire or Little Big Man from Arthur Penn.An invitation to meditate on innocence in wartime, a survival story with a second knife.

"Tunnels", by Rutu Modan

Audacieux et réussi projet que celui de Rutu Modan, la cheffe de file de la bande dessinée israélienne : traiter à la manière d’une comédie le conflit israélo-palestinien. L’action se passe en partie sous terre. Nili, la fille d’un célèbre archéologue, a décidé de poursuivre les recherches interrompues par son père au moment de l’Intifada, visant à mettre la main sur l’« Arche d’alliance », un artefact mythique caché dans une grotte au moment du siège de Jérusalem par les Babyloniens (VI^e siècle avant J.-C.). Petit hic : l’objet en question – une sorte de coffre ailé – serait enfoui derrière la barrière de séparation israélienne, autrement dit dans le sous-sol des territoires occupés. Le tunnel de l’équipe archéologique montée à la hâte par la jeune femme va alors rejoindre un autre tunnel, creusé, lui, par deux Palestiniens à des fins de contrebande…

Funny place for a meeting?No, when we master the situation comic, the misunderstandings and dialogues that slam.A crazy casting cast, made of illuminated ultraorthodox, merchants of crooked antiques and soldiers led by a lookalike from Moshe Dayan (the cache less), animates this small theater on surprisingly designed paper (the author making eachsequence by actors before drawing them).The abuse of the appropriation of a buried vestige in a region itself faced with the question of demand is not the slightest find of this subtle and "deep" album, in every sense of the word.

"Under the pebbles the beach", by Pascal Rabaté

Director in his spare time (his next film, Les Sans Dents, is expected in April 2022), Pascal Rabaté has the "camera in the eye", even when he returns to his drawing table. This is evidenced by the very cinematic staging-inventive framing, games on the depth of field, lighting in chiaroscuro-of this poetic-libertarian comedy located in a Breton seaside city in the early 1960s. Chronicler of modest people and Life in the provinces, the author of small streams (Futuropolis, 2006; adapted in 2010) offers to follow, once is not custom, three young people of good family, decided to get worse during the absence of their parents. Thinking of denial with the beautiful Odette, met on the beach, the trio will be embarked in a combination of burglary of second homes, orchestrated by a second -hand dealer with the principles of Robin des Bois. Will the son of a soldier raised with the terical, the young Albert managed to transform his crush for Odette into a new start in existence? Despite the weight of conventions, the "destinies drawn to the rule" require only to inflate themselves in this love story at the forefront of May 68 (hence its title), which does not forget to recreate The charm of post-war cinema.

"The big void", by Léa Murawiec

As a unique that her surname appears, Manel Naher must face the obvious: a successful singer, newly appeared in the People press, has the same name as it. Catastrophe for the young bookseller apprentice: all the attention that was previously paid to her by the simple declination of her identity is vampirized by the fault of this unfair competitor. It is that, in this metropolis with teeming advertising brands of surnames and first names (a bit as if Calvin Klein and Jacques Dessange trusted all the panels), nothing is more vital than knowing that we are thinking of you. In order to gain in "presence", companies even offer to have your name read by anonymous employees, at least two minutes a day ... 1984, by George Orwell, is not far away, even if the trial here is an educational Social and self -centered networks of the current era, as noted by certain emojis faces.

Cult of the personality, a distraught quest for recognition, tyranny of the lol are beaten in this dystopian fantasy which also shines with an inventive narration, with a playful dynamism.First comic book album by Léa Murawiec, the big void - from the name of a disconnected space, out of the city, where the heroine would like to take refuge to let go - amazed by the flexibility of a clear line that does not hesitateNot to play with the ladders and shatter the boxes.A calligraphic outpouring comes to enhance the subject.

"The law of the soil", by Etienne Davodeau

What do the prehistoric cave of Pech Merle (Lot) and the Center for Burel (Meuse) have in common in common?Nothing, except to think that these two underground sites educate at length on the relationship of man on the ground: on the walls of the first, Homo Sapiens has left invaluable rock paintings;In the depths of the second, it takes away durable radioactive again.One summer, Etienne Davodeau joined, on foot, these two 800 -kilometer -distant symbolic points, to the rhythm of a thinking and scholarly hike.Rich in meetings, his reverse trip of that of component pilgrims is embellished with interviews with eminent scientists (geologist, physicist, semiologist, etc.).Elegant prose and soothing washly wins this story of great maturity.