Behind its neat line, the young author’s first published comic strip subtly dissects the gray areas and perversity of its heroine.
This article is published as part of the “Libé tout en BD”, fully illustrated by cartoonists on the occasion of the opening of the 50th Angoulême festival. find all the articles of this edition hereand the newspaper on newsstands this Thursday, January 26.
The object is very soft, cover in shades of blue and pink, padded cardboard with a silky touch, soft like those children’s books to take to the bath. However, it is recommended not to put it in the hands of kids, because Roxane, not content to sell her dirty thongs to sometimes disturbed strangers, drinks too much, consumes as many drugs as Megg, Mogg and Werewolf Jones (the toxic-deviant heroes by Simon Hanselmann) together and has an alarming tendency to bully nice boys pretty badly. Beyond its flashy appearances, this first published comic by Maybelline Skvortzoff is a jewel of human complexity with lively rhythm but neat line, with this something slightly too meticulous that freezes the movement and gives the scenes a floating strangeness at the Clowes. The story is simple, a young woman lost somewhere in her twenties launches a little by chance into the business of her soiled underwear, as much by financial necessity (“Need money ? Sell your panties!” says the ad on PornHub) than for the love of shady experiments. In her relationships with her bottle-bound mother, her devoted best friend or the guys whose closeness she seeks before pushing them away, nestle with great finesse the little perversities of a heroine damaged by dint of exceeding the limits, also detestable than moving in its fear of possibly being “a bad person”. The author, almost thirty, says in a podcast that she has “did Sub-Crumb for years” after the epiphanic discovery of Nausea and admire the authors who “give a glimpse of what is most perverse about them” like Chester Brown or Joe Matt. Roxane is a worthy niece of these illustrious amoral uncles.