Christmas 2024: 12 essential comic albums to offer or treat yourself to

♦ In the time of Botchan de Natsuo Sekikawa et Jirô Taniguchi

Translated from Japanese by Émilie Nogaro

What a joy to read and reread Jirô Taniguchi, the most Franco-Belgian of Japanese cartoonists! His classy graphic universe, influenced by the clear line dear to Hergé, seduced the French-speaking public, particularly with The Summit of the Gods et Distant neighborhood, awarded at the Angoulême Festival and adapted for cinema.

Following his premature death in 2017, Casterman carefully republished his work. The opportunity to discover In the time of Botchan, published between 1987 and 1999. A literary and historical fresco, as ambitious as it is demanding, which tells how Natsume Soseki, a Japanese writer from the beginning of the 20th century, wrote one of the greatest popular novels in his country: Botchan.

The first of the five volumes opens with the figure of this novelist with an unstable mood, surrounded by his two cats and his friends, who does not hate caressing the various bottle (of beer, recently introduced in Japan). The second volume looks at the destiny of other writers of the same period. And what a time! The Meiji era marked, from 1868 to 1912, the transformation of a weakened and isolated empire into an economic power capable of competing with Europe and the United States.

Intellectuals find themselves caught up in this shift, between fascination with the West and fear of losing national identity. However, it is an atmosphere of serenity that dominates, thanks to the landscapes and interior decorations represented with meticulousness and poetry. A manga worthy of the masterpiece it honors.

Casterman, two volumes published out of five, 256 and 304 p., €20 each.

♦ Worm by Edel Rodriguez

Translated from English (United States) by Sidonie Van den Dries

How do you grow up in the shadow of a military dictatorship? By drawing, as Edel Rodriguez did when she was young, the tanks that cross the small rural town of her childhood, south of Havana. A sort of catharsis, already, for the future graphic designer whose illustrations have made the front pages of the biggest magazines who tells his story in a powerful autobiography.

Because, before becoming the artistic director of Time Magazinethe little boy learned in the 1970s to be a pioneer of the revolution, like all the children recruited into the Castro regime. A headache that worries his parents who are increasingly tempted by exile to escape the deleterious situation in their country.

In 1980, at the age of 9, he and his family boarded a fishing boat crowded with refugees. It is the beginning of a painful odyssey, the beating heart of this captivating graphic novel which carries the reader into the tumultuous waves of a perilous crossing.

Impactful, the drawing nourished by Cuban propaganda posters, strong lines enhanced with a palette restricted to five colors, serves the purpose, harsh, rough, but also touching. The work says a lot about Cuba, the United States and the tormented paths of immigration. Edel Rodriguez also does not forget to recall the worrying excesses of American democracy in the era of Trump. You develop strong antibodies when you grow up in the shadow of a dictatorship.

Bayard Graphic’, 296 p., 28 €.

♦ Sea Workers by Michel Durand

What a feat this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel is! We easily imagine that the writer, of whom Michel Durand recalls in his dedication that he was also a “huge designer”, would be proud of this depiction of his novel, written during his exile in Guernsey. It is in the Channel archipelago that the story unfolds, the maritime adventures of the solitary Gilliatt, against a backdrop of financial and romantic intrigues.

In black and white, through a multitude of lines whose thickness or spacing he varies, Michel Durand offers a kind of impressionism, with a rendering that is both realistic and dreamlike, with a text almost identical to the original. A masterpiece, which legitimately appears in the official selection of the next Angoulême Festival.

Glénat, 152 p., 35 €.

♦ Space Relic Hunters de Grun et Sylvain Runberg

Science fiction fans Star Wars, go and read the adventures of these “space relic hunters” ! All the kitsch delights of the genre are there: an infinity of extraterrestrial races with, preferably, an odd number of eyes and legs, a galaxy under the yoke of tyrannical deities, within which spaceships change solar systems like we go from Paris to the suburbs.

The heroes: a duo of bounty hunters, a cynical but endearing human and a masked alien with a mysterious past, whose contract turns into an epic, conspiracy, galactic war and so on. The drawing offers a great spectacle, the characters are well-tempered characters. In short, a space opera like we don’t do anymore.

Daniel Maghen, 112 p., 23 €.

♦ 1629, or the frightening story of the shipwrecked people of the Jakarta (2 volumes) by Xavier Dorison (screenplay) and Thimothée Montaigne (drawing)

Inspired by the true story of a shipwreck in the 17th century^e century, this naval thriller offers a stifling closed session aboard the Jakarta, a three-masted ship heavy with gold and diamonds, running aground off the coast of Australia. Without water or food, the 260 castaways try to survive, while a rowboat hopes to reach Java to seek help.

But the highest ranking officer remaining on the island, Jeronimus Cornelius, already at the origin of a mutiny, decides to reign as a bloodthirsty tyrant. The combination of the realistic style of Thimothée Montaigne, always as effective, and the scriptwriting experience of Xavier Dorison results in a captivating diptych for those who love maritime stories.

Glénat, 144 p., €35 per volume.

♦ Batman earth-one, complete Geoff Johns (screenplay) and Gary Frank (design)

Translated from English (United States) by Alex Nikolavitch

A villain, the Penguin, who has become the mayor of Gotham City, a butler, Alfred, ready to fight, and Bruce Wayne who finds his grandfather and flirts with a madness inherited from his family’s dark past… With Batman earth-oneauthors Geoff Johns and Gary Frank forcefully reinterpret the origins of the Dark Knight.

Initially published in 2012 in three volumes, this series quickly established itself as a classic of the adventures of the vigilante created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in 1939. A thriller noir atmosphere, very realistic graphics and a clever storyline make this story , which is released in full, a great success.

Urban Comics, 464 p, 40 €.

♦ Signé Olrik by Yves Sente (screenplay) and André Juillard (drawing) (1)

Blake and Mortimer from A to Z by Jean-Pierre Naugrette (2)

Olrik is back! And Blake and Mortimer’s favorite enemy isn’t alone. He is imprisoned in the company of members of a Cornish independence group, led by a “Grand Druid” obsessed with withdrawal into identity and the quest for King Arthur’s treasure.

This thirtieth adventure of the “so British” heroes is the final work of André Juillard who left us in July 2024. A last opportunity to appreciate his elegant line. A beautiful book also revisits in the form of an alphabet book all the albums in the series created by EP Jacobs with numerous rare documents and sketches.

(1) Éditions Blake and Mortimer, 64 p., €17. (2) La Martinière – Le Monde, 152 p., €26.50.

♦ Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson

Translated from English (United States) by Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, Laëtitia and Frédéric Vivien

All it took was a ginseng balm, intended to numb joint pain, to awaken Craig Thompson’s memories. The plant “madeleine”, the anthropomorphic root of this plant with humanoid shapes, takes him back to the small rural town in Wisconsin where the American author spent his youth, in the 1980s, harvesting this curative and lucrative plant.

Digging the intimate furrow already plowed by Craig Thompson in the moving Blankets (2004), this novel, as abundant as it is fascinating, a veritable graphic whirlwind with realistic lines, brings to fruition a vast historical, social and spiritual investigation into the cultivation of ginseng.

Casterman, 448 p., 27 €.

♦ Asterix the Gaul birthday box by René Goscinny (screenplay) and Albert Uderzo (design)

It is always moving to read Goscinny in the text and not in images. On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of Asterix, Éditions Albert René are releasing a limited edition (25,000 copies all the same) of a box set containing the typewritten scenario and the original plates ofAsterix the Gaulpremier album sorti en 1961.

Two books facing each other which allow a comparison of Goscinny’s text and its rendering into images drawn and inked (but not colored) by Uderzo. A work of art where Goscinny’s underlying intentions can also be read: in the first box, he specifies that we can only see the legs of the Roman soldiers, “like in the documentaries showing the Germans entering France».

Editions Albert René, 208 p., €25.

♦ Madeleine, resistant by Madeleine Riffaud and Jean-David Morvan (screenwriters), Dominique Bertail (drawing)

Riffaud is dead, long live Madeleine! Died at the beginning of November after a century of existence and struggles, she recounted her commitment to the Resistance in this fascinating series of albums. A precise and powerful story co-written with the complicity of Jean-David Morvan, distinguished screenwriter, which testifies to the audacity and ingenuity of a youth desperate for freedom.

Throughout the illustrated pages of the magnificent plates with cinematographic frames by Dominique Bertail, realistic and supple line in Indian ink, enhanced with bluish watercolors, we tremble for the young Madeleine, 19 years old, but whose courage is that of a seasoned veteran.

Dupuis, three volumes, €23.50 each.

♦ Nestor Burma. Integral by Tardi (screenplay and drawing) adapted from Léo Malet

While a new Tardi album is released, freely inspired, but not very inspiring, by the adventures of Nestor Burma, Rififi in Ménilmontantfans of the casual detective will be able to console themselves with this complete set of previous adaptations of Léo Malet’s noir novels by Adèle Blanc-Sec’s father.

Four albums of investigations that are both tasty and harsh in Paris in the 1950s, faithfully reconstructed by Tardi’s inimitable style, rounded, realistic and mocking. Throughout the black and white pages, in the gray streets of popular Paname, gloomy or cheeky faces parade, sometimes haunted by the traumas of war or poverty. Fortunately, Burma always manages to knock out the sadness and the mystery!

Casterman, 416 p., 49 €.

♦ Glory by Pierre-Henry Gomont

Love stories usually end badly. In Russia, the adage applies to stories, in general. Enough to make life, particularly those of Dimitri, a devious con artist, and Slava, a disillusioned artist, even more hectic. As long as you know how to seize your chance. However, in Russia in the 1990s, anything goes.

Through the tragicomic tribulations of our two characters, the contours of a country in full decomposition, between egalitarian ideal and capitalism, are outlined, using Cyrillic onomatopoeia, inventive ideograms and leaping drawings by Pierre-Henry Gomont. savage. Or how empires are made over a vodka at the counter of a bar in the suburbs, and are undone at the speed of a rifle bullet…

Dargaud, three volumes, €22.50 each.