Tsuge, Pich, Schrauwen and a crocodile that is going to slap her

In an increasingly compartmentalized world, well positioned for correct labeling so that algorithms do not have problems, the term rentrée It comes in handy to happily display editorial news throughout the cultural press. But, oh, reader, you already know that the motto of this holy house is “proud to be late for the latest news”, so, in this, your comic criticism section, we will review four comics that have months in bookstores and that, of course, you can continue to find them if you want to read them. Against the tyranny of rentréeCTXTé (I hope they don’t edit this joke).

Tadao Tsuge (Tokyo, 1941) is (and we say “is” because he is still active), along with his brother Yoshiharu (Tokyo, 1937), one of the great masters of sleeve adult, known as gekiga (if we were talking about labels before, the truth is that no one likes it more than a Japanese). On the pages of Garoan avant-garde magazine founded in 1968 whose impact still resonates today, Tsuge painted an oppressive portrait of postwar Japan, the Japan of the defeated. sentimental melody (Gallo Nero, translation by Yoko Ogihara and Fernando Cordobés) compiles six images of a wounded society that finds it difficult to heal. Tsuge is a meticulous draftsman, with a special taste for spaces and environments, which he details with meticulous pen plots. The rain, the night and the wind underline the physical and mental nausea of ​​characters who travel through distressing, broken cities, plagued by poverty and violence. Tsuge knows what he’s talking about because he was there. During the 1950s, he made a living working in a blood bank, a place where all kinds of people came willing to make some money. The first story of the volume, Garbage collectororiginally published in 1972, a memoir of his time in one of these establishments, is a masterpiece that shows no mercy, a very dark portrait that Tsuge uses to settle accounts with his past, his gender and his compatriots, with hardly any silver lining.

We continue with the light comedy (ahem) and without leaving Japan, because This crocodile will die in 100 days (Fandogamia, translation by Guillermo Torres Moreno) delivers what it promises: the protagonist, an anonymous anthropomorphic crocodile, dies after a countdown in which each day corresponds to a chapter of the sleevewritten and drawn by Yuuki Kikuchi (Tokyo, 1985). Be careful, I wasn’t kidding before: Kikuchi composes a kind of situation comedy starring the crocodile and his gang, young people who jump between precarious jobs without much future and enjoy eating ramen instant. Kikuchi’s drawing is friendly, with pleasant flat colors, and his characters are friendly and full of charisma. The structure is very simple and the everyday nature of its dialogues makes the work feel relatable despite being set in Japan and starring anthropomorphic animals, but it drops charge after depth charge on the waterline of late capitalism with elegance and success: from the difficulty of communication in a hyper-technical society to the failure of the model proposed by neoliberalism, themes that conclude in the central axis of the work: the inevitability of death, which can also arrive when one least expects it and has been left with the colleagues to have a chat.

Precisely that is one of the favorite activities of the protagonist of the following comic, fungirl (Fandogamia, translation by Marina Vidal), except that his garbeos are peppered with destruction of private property, broken bones and desecration of graves. Elizabeth Pich (1989), author, along with Jonathan Kuntz, of the successful webcomic War and Peassteps on the accelerator from the first pages, in which our protagonist does not realize that she is about to start a fire in her house because she has lost her mind while masturbating and has not watched her pizza in the oven . Fungirl shares a flat with a couple of friends who support her as best they can, she gets a job in a funeral home and has countless adventures caused by her own nature as an agent of chaos. Related to both Megg (the heroine of Simon Hanselmann’s comics) and Olive Oyl (Popeye’s girlfriend), Fungirl, the character, is an unbridled cyclone of physical comedy and black humor, questioning any type of convention. social, whether conservative or progressive. For its part, fungirlthe work, is an example of a type of comic that is increasingly difficult to find, the comic with pure laughter, alienated and shameless, with urgent and frenetic drawing (characters without facial features of kinetic expressiveness, color palette reduced to the minimum), which is perhaps penalized by the search for an ending that gives meaning to the absurd nonsense that we have witnessed for two hundred or so pages, which, in any case, is a minor stain on the record of the comic that most It has made me laugh for several years.

And the endings, really, are the least important. And the great leader of contemporary avant-garde comics, Olivier Schrauwen (1977, Bruges), guru of majareta experimentation, knows this (see previous chapters of The good comicson this same website), which publishes in Spain its most ambitious work to date (something that, in this case, is not a publicity stunt, it is the pure truth): flamenco sunday (Fulgencio Pimentel, translation by César Sánchez and Joana Carro), paper transcription of the day that a somewhat posh and rather stupid graphic designer spends while waiting for his partner’s return and the celebration of his birthday the next day. Critics have wanted to link Schrauwen’s work with the Ulysses of Joyce, as a story with the unit of time limited to one day, with a polyphonic and exhausting voice (seasoned by the abusive consumption of alcohol); although I see it closer to the A day in the lifeof the Beatles, both for the exuberance of records and for sensory enjoyment, that the comics are watched, as well as read.

Once again, Schrauwen relies on a supposed member of his family to put together the comic, as he did with his mythical ancestor Arsène in Arsène Schrauwen (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2017). This time it is his cousin Thibault, who suggests that he document in a drawn way, as we read from Schrauwen himself in the prologue, one of those “days without direction, full of procrastination and boredom” that are so familiar to the bourgeois reader and, let’s say , of liberal profession. So the Belgian gets to work and offers us in glorious risograph (trademark printing technique) his cousin’s Sunday, his thoughts, his actions, his showers, his joints, his beers, his dances and his miseries But we also see the movements of his girlfriend lost in God knows where while she tries to return home, how a colleague from wandering and an expired love try to surprise her, the strange tenderness that awakens in her neighbor and the adventures of an elusive mouse. Betrayal of the initial objective or traps necessary to fit the complete puzzle? Both things at the same time, of course, because no one here ever talked about setting rules. The result, a pharaonic work and a milestone in the history of contemporary comics: no one has ever drawn better the way we turn off our brain while watching an idiotic movie on TV.

In an increasingly compartmentalized world, well positioned for correct labeling so that algorithms do not have problems, the term rentrée It comes in handy to happily display editorial news throughout the cultural press. But, oh, reader, reader,…