THE MORNING LIST
Twelve albums are on the menu of our monthly selection. In this spring delivery, you will come across, among others, a seal hunter, a brother who died too soon, a dictator on the decline, a vanished Paris…
“The Little Brother”: at the heart of pain
JeanLouis Tripp has long thought that the mourning of a child could only be shared with people who have experienced the same tragedy. And then the designer changed his mind. Four decades later, he recounts the death of his younger brother Gilles, aged 11, victim of a road accident in Brittany. It was August 1976, the (extended) family was riding in two horse-drawn trailers when a car mowed down the boy who was leaning out of the platform, before fleeing. Using wash like a balm, Tripp decided to stick as closely as possible to facts and memories. Nothing is forgotten: the accident itself, the transfer to the hospital, the announcement of death by a doctor who does not dare say so, the funeral, the odious argument of the driver’s lawyer, the slow recovery…
A tearful sincerity coats this realistic tale at the heart of inconceivable pain: what greater injustice than “unnatural loss” of a child? The poison of guilt, the hollow burden of absence, the skein of family silences that followed the tragedy: to the upset reader, Tripp reminds the power of drawing in its ability to reconstruct the past and probe the unspeakable. Frédéric Potet
The little brotherby JeanLouis Tripp, Casterman, 344 pages, €28.
“T’zée”: an African tragedy
It is the story of the end of a reign. That of T’zée, monstrous crossing of Mobutu and Idi Amin Dada. Presumed dead after a coup led by rebels, the dictator suddenly reappears in his palace, lost deep in the equatorial forest in central Africa. Implacable, the old leopard wants to quell the rebellion and regain power. But Bobby, the young beauty who has become his wife, and Hippolyte, the despised son of the braided tyrant, no longer believe in it. Too much blood, too many massacres. Is another future possible for the two heirs, crossed by troubled feelings? Majestic but terrible, this graphic novel succeeds in mixing the African imagination with classical tragedy. As if Phèdre were inviting herself to the land of fetishes and undermining. Brüno’s very cinematic drawing, recognizable among all, is at its peak. Cédric Pietralunga
T’zée, an African tragedyd’Appollo and Bruno, Dargaud, 160 p., 22,50 €.
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