Customer Reviews

Maybe Later

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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.

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.