Revengeful, grating, the designer Bastien Vivès takes the risk of offending in his new comic strip, “The Truth about the Vivès affair”satire on his setbacks after the accusations against him for his works mixing minors and pornography.
The work, black lines on white backgrounds, appears on Wednesday from a new comic book house, Charlotte Éditions.
The author has had a special status, since December 2022. The Angoulême International Comics Festival then canceled an exhibition, due to “physical threats” made against him.
Then the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation the following month, entrusted to the Minor Protection Brigade, to “dissemination of child pornography images”.
This is still ongoing, with no prosecution at this stage.
At issue: three works including “Little Paul”controversial at the time of its release in September 2018. The book, which features a child with a disproportionate penis having sexual relations with adult women, was the subject of a report from the association Face à l’inceste . In February 2019, the Nanterre public prosecutor’s office concluded that« absence d’infraction ».
The other two titles are “The Melons of Wrath” (2011), vague parody of “Grapes of Wrath” where a teenage peasant girl is raped by several men from her village, and “The Mental Dump” (2018).
Outrageous
Bastien Vivès argues that these are fictions and drawings, and that there is therefore no infringement.
“I find myself in something that seems very Kafkaesque to me. We are talking about representations, drawings, fictional characters. Or maybe the rules of the game have completely changed, and I didn’t realize it.”he told AFP.
For several child defense associations, on the contrary, there is, as provided in article 227-23 of the penal code, “representation of a minor” Who “presents a pornographic character”. Whether it is drawings or fiction does not allow one to escape the law, these associations repeat.
“The Truth about the Vivès affair” gives an outrageous version of what could have happened to the author: obligation to follow a « stage antipédophilie » of a week, where he sleeps in a cell resembling a dilapidated dungeon, then a “comics deconstruction course”hearings before devious police officers, incarceration, harassment from Japanese publishers asking him to become a “great pedophile manga author”etc.
“Passive dissident”
Cartoonist Bastien Vivès on August 30, 2021 in Paris / JOEL SAGET / AFP/Archives
His way of making fun of a serious subject, and bordering on victimhood, should go down badly with his detractors.
“A virulent settling of scores”according to the daily Libération, “way of presenting oneself as a glorious resistance fighter, a passive and overbearing dissident, as if this kind of anti-woke charge was not constantly carried in the media”.
“I’m not trying to convince anyone”insists the author. “I suggest we laugh about it. There will be those who laugh at it, and those who do not laugh at it.”.
Since the cancellation of the Angoulême exhibition, he has not promoted it in France.
“I have avoided public events, although I plan to return to Angoulême next year. I hope that things in the community will have calmed down. Let no author think that I am a child molester”he said.
Charlotte Éditions launched a monthly magazine, to which he collaborates. Number one, in September, included among others an illustrated poem by Michel Houellebecq, unpublished. But there was a lack of female authors.
“We’re trying to recruit some, but it’s complicated because it has my name. People today, before entering into anything, look at who else there is so as not to be associated with this or that person.deplores Bastien Vivès.
In the midst of the controversy, in December 2022, he apologized. He assured that he “at no time wanted to hurt victims of crimes and sexual abuse” and “condemn child crime, as well as its apology and trivialization”.
