Maybe Later [Hardcover]

Charles Berberian (Author), Philippe Dupuy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2006

An inside look at France's superstar cartooning team

Maybe Later sees Dupuy & Berberian working separately for the first time, each cartoonist taking turns to tell the behind-the-scenes "making of" their bestselling Mr. Jean series. In fluid black-and-white, with hilariously paranoid digressions and surreal dream sequences, Maybe Later is a record of their unique artistic partnership, midlife and its demons, the stress of deadlines, and the friends and colleagues who help and goad along the way. Above all, it's about the creative process, with aliens, pawns, and deflated superheroes battling procrastination
and self-doubt in defense of the simple pleasure of telling stories through pictures.

Maybe Later is a rare opportunity to discover each of the artists in his own right. And for newcomers, it's a superb introduction to the quiet wit, brilliant narrative style, and refined visual language of the Mr. Jean stories; the first three short stories are collected in D+Q's Get a Life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These two famed French cartoonists are a longtime team, but here they split up for the first time to create a comic that exposes the personal side of creativity. Yet the book has more than just behind the scenes info. By the end this becomes a touching story about the lives of two artists facing middle-age. The cartoonists tell their separate stories in different styles. Berberian takes the mundane events in his life and infuses them with comical asides drawn in a loose and easy manner. This technique has more than comedic value; it also provides insight into what a life soaked in pop culture is like. He makes use of subjects like the Simpsons and Batman to examine his desire to capture a childhood that is gone forever. Dupuy starts off his comic in a similar nervous state, this time about how egocentric this book can be. Then he is told his mother has died and he sums up her life in six graceful panels. Dupuy's section deals with a deeper kind of loss and how it, too, affects growing up. Instead of looking back, Dupuy looks forward to a world that can seem very scary. Even when they're not creating a strip together, Dupuy and Berberian complement each other perfectly. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In Maybe Later Dupuy and Berberian juxtapose one another's journals in comics during the making of the latest M. Jean book. As they, along with their creation, approach middle age, they deal with personal concerns both trivial--Berberian's splurging on CDs and books, and his obsession with Batman--and grave--the death of Dupuy's mother and the near-breakup of his marriage. It's tempting to say that Berberian is the yang to Dupuy's yin, but it's not that simple. Jean, like each of his creators--like each of us--is bedeviled by demons and comforted by life's pleasures, great and small. Both artists detail their insecurities as they struggle with the creative process and their frustrations with mundane business matters as their longtime publisher totters on the brink of bankruptcy. The book's unorthodox structure reveals how Dupuy and Berberian transform personal experiences into Jean's saga and divulges their collaborative working methods. Dupuy and Berberian prove as beguiling as their creation. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1896597211
• ISBN-13: 978-1896597218
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,419,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Comic for a change. Must Read., September 18, 2008

By 

Suvro Ghosh (Austin, TX, USA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maybe Later (Hardcover)

I keep buying books and now I am collecting them. There will be a time when all these books will end up as orphans and no one will care for them. Ah screw that thought. I can't stop now. A man needs a hobby, needs a collection. I can't collect what Bill Gates collects, at least I can collect comics. Correction comics with a flair, and this one is one of those precious few.

The book is actually two in one. The first part by Dupuy and the second part by Berberian, their struggle to get this book out, amidst the struggle of day to day life. Comic book writing is not easy, if you want to earn a reputation to keep writing more. People are very choosy when it comes to this method of expression. Although it may be just a couple of nerds that are driving this industry it is a very competitive niche.

Its really a change from the ordinary themes. A comic book about the making of a comic book. That and a sort of parallel memoir of Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian in their own struggle to write this book.

I loved it.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Humorous Experiment, but Lacking in Good Writing, January 14, 2007

By 

K. Nishikawa (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Maybe Later (Hardcover)

In this "meta-commentary" on the trials of collaborative artistry and comics publishing, the celebrated French duo of Dupuy and Berberian give us a revealing look into their lives as the "lovable losers" behind the popular Monsieur Jean comics series. They conceive of their project as a "journal," documenting their everyday struggles in trying to bring the third M. Jean book to fruition.

There's much to like about this volume, including the rather bizarre flights of fancy that each artist indulges, whether questioning his love life or negotiating his artistic ambitions in the publishing business. Although they alternate writing and drawing various sections of the book, Dupuy and Berberian are clearly attuned to each other's foibles and predelictions, sometimes poking fun at the other in a particular frame or sequence.

By and large, though, I found the writing in this volume to be incoherent and sometimes tedious. It's not that I was looking for a narrative arc -- I realize this book is a kind of "fragmentary pleasure" in comics culture more generally. My concern was that the *tone* of the writing varied wildly from one section to the next, thus diminishing any sense of continuous readerly interest over the course of the book.

I like that Dupuy and Berberian have rather different personalities; but their game of narrative "tag" detracts from the raw emotions they're trying to express on the page. In a sense, I wish they had allowed for non-narrative creativity without foregoing their ingenious chronicling of everyday human feeling.