Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Josephine Baker
WORK NOTES: illus by Catel Muller
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/28/1962
WEBSITE:
CITY: Paris
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
https://shepherdexpress.com/arts-and-entertainment/books/josephine-baker-selfmadehero-jose-luis-bocquet-catel-muller/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 28, 1962.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, graphic novelist, comics writer, and biographer.
AWARDS:Recipient of awards, with Catel Muller, for French edition of Kiki de Montparnasse.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Jose-Luis Bocquet is a French novelist, comics writer, and biographer. He is a frequent collaborator with illustrator Catel Muller. Their work includes graphic-novel biographies of two notable but relatively obscure figures from the arts and entertainment industry in the early and middle twentieth century.
Kiki de Montparnasse
The first of these biographies, Kiki de Montparnasse, concerns the titular de Montparnasse, a well-known model, singer, painter, performer, and member of the French social scene in Paris and Montparnasse, France. Born Alice Prin, she was born in 1901 and grew up in severe poverty. She was a scandalous figure of the time, a model who frequently posed nude and a singer whose songs were often bawdy. She partook of large amounts of drugs and alcohol and lived a bohemian lifestyle among the artistic crowd of Paris.
De Montparnasse was not merely a model for sculptors and artists, but was the muse of many and the lover of some. In her teens, she posed nude for sculptors, which led to conflicts with her mother. She was a longtime companion and lover of visual artist Man Ray, who created hundreds of images of her. She was also involved with other prominent creators, such as Jean Cocteau. She died in 1953, as poverty-stricken as she had been during her younger days. In her relatively brief life, however, she influenced many prominent artists and became a symbol of the freedoms and risks of a debauched bohemian lifestyle.
Bocquet and Muller’s “ribald comic strip version [of de Montparnasse’s life] is as tender as it is witty, and is a complex portrait of the model and muse,” commented Justine Picardie, writing in the London Guardian. The creators “resist the temptation to turn Kiki into either an emblematic victim of male objectification or the proud symbol of female emancipation,” Picardie further remarked. Instead, their work portrays the contradictions that were a constant presence in de Montparnasse’s life. In the book, “her liberated sexual freedom is shadowed by a masochistic tendency to forgive abusive lovers; while her joyous embrace of the pleasures of life (food, art, wine, song, sunshine) is enmeshed with drug addiction and alcoholism,” Picardie stated.
Josephine Baker
In Josephine Baker, Bocquet and Miller explore the life of another performing artist who sparked controversy through her art and by living according to her own criteria. Josephine Baker was a singer, dancer, and performer in America during the 1920s. The African American Baker was known for revealing costumes and performances that challenged the standards of the time.
However, Baker was not just a dancer who sometimes shocked her audience. Bocquet and Miller cover multiple areas of Baker’s life, revealing some often surprising aspects of her personality and background. For example, they show how Baker was a tireless advocate for civil rights and racial equality, using her fame to combat racism in the United States and in areas around the world. They discuss the twelve children of different racial backgrounds that Baker adopted and named her “Rainbow Tribe,” not only to give the children a stable home but to show how kids of different races could coexist in harmony. They show how she served as a spy in the French Resistance during World War II and how, later in life, she was celebrated in Paris.
Reviewer Jason Sacks, writing on the website Your Chicken Enemy, called Josephine Baker a “a dutiful and occasionally charming chronicle of an important life presented in a plain and ordinary manner, with high moments and low moments all chronicled with the same sort of steadfast monotony and midlevel distance.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer remarked that it is “clear in every page” that the artist and writer of this biography “adore their subject and wish to do her justice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Summer Hayes, review of Josephine Baker, p. 73.
Guardian (London, England), March 19, 2011, Justine Picardie, review of Kiki de Montparnasse.
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of Josephine Baker, p. 45.
ONLINE
Your Chicken Enemy, http://www.danielelkin.com/ (May 27, 2017), review of Josephine Baker.
Too Busy Thinking About My Comics Blog, http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/ (July 6, 2015), Colin Smith, review of Kiki De Montparnasse.
José‑Luis Bocquet is a novelist and comics writer. He lives in Paris.
Josephine Baker
Summer Hayes
Booklist. 113.19-20 (June 2017): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Josephine Baker. By Jose-Luis Bocquet. Illus. by Catei Muller. Tr. by Edward Gauvin and Mercedes Claire Gilliom. 2017. 568p. SelfMadeHero, paper, $22.95 (9781910593295). 741.5.
Known to many only in the iconic banana costume that made her famous in the 1920s, singer and dancer Josephine Baker lived an incredibly rich life beyond the theater. She was a tireless activist for civil rights and leveraged her status whenever possible to break down racial barriers in the U.S. and around the world. This book follows Baker from her birth in 1906, touching on the many significant events in her life, from her spy work in the French Resistance to adopting the 12 children that made up her Rainbow Tribe. The simply rendered, black-and-white illustrations and unfussy panels allow Baker's talent and accomplishments to take center stage on the pages, capturing her abundant energy, which radiated on stage and in her personal life until her death in 1975. Pair this introduction to Baker's life with a deeper biography for a full understanding of this larger-than-life personality, whose influence is still felt today. Includes a detailed timeline, bibliography, and extensive biographical notes.--Summer Hayes
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hayes, Summer. "Josephine Baker." Booklist, June 2017, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582782/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=11f61d1a. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582782
Josephine Baker
Publishers Weekly. 264.20 (May 15, 2017): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Josephine Baker
Jose-Luis Bocquet and Catel Muller.
Selfmadehero, $22.95 trade paper (496p)
ISBN 978-1-910593-29-5
Entertainer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker, who fled America to fame in Europe, remains one of the 20th century's most fascinating figures, and this biography aims to capture why in encyclopedic detail. No era of her life is unexamined: we begin with her meager start in St. Louis and end with her death in 1975. While this is admirable--and never truly boring, as Baker had few boring moments--it is, by the end of 500 pages, exhausting. Every single moment receives the same amount of emphasis, from her dazzling triumph as the toast of Paris to her childhood waitressing jobs. That said, the book is a visual delight--Muller captures the elegance, charm, and clownishness that made Baker such a legendary performer with visual aplomb. It is clear in every page that Bocquet and Muller (Kiki de Montparnasse) adore their subject and wish to do her justice, but they miss the chance to transform a life into an engaging story of bigotry, sacrifice, and glamour. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Josephine Baker." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 45. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435645/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5655d190. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435645
novels
Kiki de Montparnasse by Jose-Luis Bocquet and Catel Muller – review
Kiki de Montparnasse is celebrated in a quirky graphic biography
Justine Picardie
Sat 19 Mar 2011 00.06 GMT First published on Sat 19 Mar 2011 00.06 GMT
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Page spread from Kiki de Montparnasse
Le Violon d'Ingres? From Kiki de Montparnasse: The Graphic Biography
Alice Prin was the model known as Kiki, immortalised by myriad artists including Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, and her lover, Man Ray. It seems fitting that her latest biography should take a graphic form, in which she swoops across the pages alongside her friends and contemporaries Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and Hemingway.
The story of Prin could be told as a grim and cautionary tale – born illegitimate in Châtillon-sur-Seine in 1901, she died in equal poverty in 1953, after a lifetime of drink and drugs and debauchery. But this ribald comic strip version is as tender as it is witty, and is a complex portrait of the model and muse. The author and artist, Jose-Luis Bocquet and Catel Muller – whose collaboration has already won several awards for the original French edition – resist the temptation to turn Kiki into either an emblematic victim of male objectification or the proud symbol of female emancipation. Instead, Kiki's contradictions emerge from the cartoons: her liberated sexual freedom is shadowed by a masochistic tendency to forgive abusive lovers; while her joyous embrace of the pleasures of life (food, art, wine, song, sunshine) is enmeshed with drug addiction and alcoholism.
When Kiki's own memoirs were published in 1929 (and promptly banned in the United States), her friend Ernest Hemingway wrote an introduction that acknowledged her capacity for self-invention. "Having a fine face to start with she made of it a work of art . . . she certainly dominated that era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era." Kiki's creativity was also apparent in the illustrations she sketched for her memoir, black and white drawings that shade between childlike innocence and something darker; and despite their surface naivety, her status as an artist, as well as a model, had already been consolidated with a sold-out exhibition of paintings in Paris in 1927.
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Nevertheless, the most enduringly famous image of Kiki is Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres, a photograph of her naked from behind, her signature bobbed hair hidden in a turban, her remarkable face almost hidden, and her voluptuous body transformed into a musical instrument by the addition of the "f-holes" of a violin. The title suggests Man Ray's inspiration came from paintings by Ingres; and also, perhaps, that he fingered Kiki as a plaything, just as Ingres played the violin.
Muller and Bocquet's cover is something of an uncovering for Kiki: for although the drawing is a reflection of Man Ray's portrait, this version has her head free of the turban, and her profile clearer than the original. You can see her charismatic features – big nose and playful eyes framed by the black sharpness of her hair – as a beguiling invitation to look inside. The pages that follow are filled with legendary men, the surrealists and cubists and dadaists who shaped bohemian Paris, all of them presented here fighting and eating and jostling to make a living, as well as making love, just like Kiki herself. But she is centre stage, the queen of Montparnasse, whether posing for Man Ray, or as a bawdy nightclub act, lifting her skirts and showing her bottom whenever the mood took her. (After a fashionable dinner given by Coco Chanel in June 1929, one of the guests, Maurice Sachs, noted in his diary that "Kiki, who had too much to drink, sang very obscene songs.")
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In the end, she was too much for Man Ray to handle; not least when the instrument of his art and pleasure was noisily arrested, after she got into a fight in a Nice bar and hit the policeman who called her a whore. Man Ray employed a lawyer to represent Kiki, who could only get her out of prison by declaring that she had a "nervous disorder"; thereafter the relationship between artist and model was sporadic, and ended when Man Ray fell in love with his protégée, Lee Miller, in 1929, by which point Kiki was already involved in another affair.
Kiki's career subsequently veered between cabaret and drug addiction, and by the time Man Ray returned to Paris in the spring of 1951 (having left the city at the outbreak of the second world war), she was swollen with alcoholism and dropsy. Man Ray offered help, to which she gave her renowned reply: "No! A raw onion, a heel of bread and some red wine is enough for me", and after he pressed money on her, she promptly handed it over to a beggar. That, at least, is the comic-strip version, but it has the ring of truth, as does the last page of the story, in which Man Ray weeps when he hears that Kiki is dead at the age of 51, the artist alone in his studio, but surrounded by the artworks he had made of the woman who finally slipped out of his grasp.
Justine Picardie's Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life is published by HarperCollins.
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Review: JOSEPHINE BAKER by Jose'-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller
JOSEPHINE BAKER
Written by: José-Louis Bocquet
Art by: Catel Muller
Published by: SelfMadeHero
Available HERE
Daniel, Josephine Baker was a fascinating woman. Her life was one of incredible highs and even more unbelievable lows. As an African-American woman growing up in St. Louis, “the northermost city in the South,” Baker witnessed her home being burned down by an angry mob and experienced deep racism nearly everywhere she went in our country. But Baker was a transcendent star far from the institutionalized hatred of the South. Her light shone brightly in the theaters of Broadway, and Baker became a towering figure on the world stage when she moved to France in order to pursue her career.
All of this intense real-world drama would make for a spellbinding graphic novel exploring the ideas of racism and international relations, or broken marriages that lead to massive adoptions, or the story of the rise and fall of an incredibly talented woman, or all kinds of fascinating stories people have told over the years about Josephine Baker.
Too bad this book doesn’t tell any of those stories.
Josephine Baker by Catel and Bocquet is an illustrated Wikipedia article, a dutiful and occasionally charming chronicle of an important life presented in a plain and ordinary manner, with high moments and low moments all chronicled with the same sort of steadfast monotony and midlevel distance.
Though Catel Miller’s art is often sweet and empathetic, it also is in service to a pedantic presentation. We want to get inside the head of this most marvelous musician, but instead, this graphic novel actually distances the reader from Baker. It makes her more mysterious and less relatable. We watch these events happen, but we are placed far from them, as if writer Jose-Luis Boucquet is having Baker parade across a stage, reciting facts and incidents about her life, but ultimately never revealing herself to the reader.
The back of the book is filled with a timeline (of events we just read about) and an eye-popping eighty (yes, eighty!) pages of biography about incidental characters in Baker’s life, from her mother and sister to ex-husbands and admirers like Man Ray and Le Corbusier to people like Charles De Gaulle and Martin Luther King who require no biography. I was scratching my head at the pointless placement of these sketches. Isn’t it the job of a good narrative to fill in these blanks for the reader?
Daniel, I wanted so much to love this 500+ page tome. Instead, I was dreadfully bored by it, as if I was watching a performance by a second-rate Josephine Baker imitator who narrated her songs rather than singing them to me.
Jason Sacks (@JasonSacks)
Sacks, you may have been dreadfully bored, but I was just exhausted by the end of this thing. A biography should inform you about the subject, enlighten you to the inner workings of the mind of this individual, and give you insight into how the forces of history helped shaped their accomplishments. You should put down a good biography and feel that you have come to understand who that person was, not feel like you’ve aged 68 years as you have plodded through every damn moment of Josephine Baker’s life.
I chose the word “plodded” with great intention here. As you have pointed out above, Sacks, this book has the pacing you need to climb a mountain -- slow and steady -- and yet it never offers the rewards of a magnificent and expansive view from the top.
So why make the journey at all? Because it was there? Pffffffffftttttttttt….
And all that backmatter there at the end of the book? Geez. Why include it as it only repeats what came before and points to the fact that this bio probably would have functioned better as a solid prose piece, not a graphic collaboration?
I firmly believe that you can be exhaustive without being so exhausting.
For example, I’m currently reading Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp: A Biography. It’s 465 pages of text, followed by 40 pages of Notes, a two-page Appendix, 12 pages of Selected Bibliography, two pages of Acknowledgments, and 22 pages of Index. And yet, at 548 pages total, it’s gripping, explorative, fully realized, and fascinating to read. Both the artist and his art are evoked with clarity and lucidity, and I have a hard time putting it down when I get started into it. Tomkin’s work is exhaustive and exhilarating. It beautifully demonstrates the possibilities of telling a great story through great storytelling.
And this only highlights the failure of Catel and Bocquet’s Baker biography. A rich and important life such as Baker’s should lend itself well to comics, as her image was so tied into her talent. Much like that Bowie book we reviewed earlier, Sacks, this one missed the mark entirely (interestingly, both of these books are published by SelfMadeHero).
I respect the amount of work these creators invested into bringing this book to life. As well, I really wanted to like this book because of the power that Baker’s biography could impart in our modern times. Unfortunately, all I got was a heavily researched, painfully plodding, missed opportunity.
-- Daniel Elkin (@DanielElkin)
On Catel Muller & Jose-Luis Bocquet's "Kiki De Montparnasse", Comics Criticism & The Detail Of Storytelling
1.
As we've come to expect, the storytelling of Muller & Bocquet in their masterful Kiki De Montparnasse hardly merited a line in many of its English language reviews. Two favourable critiques in a single leading British broadsheet during 2011 succeeded in mustering but a lone reference to the book's art between them. Even there, the analysis was disconcertingly brisk and facile, noting only that Muller's cover is a playful reference to Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres. (In the absence of a single measure of truly informed comics analysis, the observation came across more as Sunday supplement oneupmanship than serious criticism.) Without anything but the most passing of nods to the book's sequential storytelling, how could the collaboration between Muller and Bocquet possibly be described or evaluated? How might the virtues and otherwise of a graphic novel be discussed if the work of its creators was only to be mentioned in a passing and gossipy fashion?
With Kiki De Montparnasse, as with so many other examples of comics reviews in the English-speaking "quality" press, the narrative was discussed as if it were a typical book that just happened to contain an untypical number of otherwise non-essential images. From this came the condescending suggestion from one accomplished reviewer that Kiki De Montparnasse has all the virtues of a quick and charming exam crammer, a Cliff Notes for the culture-chitchat classes. Rather than the inconvenience and effort demanded by a more traditional history of Bohemian Paris (1913-1953), why not just pick up a few key facts from the diverting pages of Muller and Bocquet's work? This, it seems, is what passes as an appraisal of a quite brilliant graphic novel; it entertained the learned reviewer for an hour or two while, with a minimum of effort, enabled them to subsequently impress their friends with morsels of aren't-I-clever facts
2.
It seems remarkable that even the more dynamic of Muller & Bocquet's pages should escape the notice of so many of our print media's learned gatekeepers. What hope then for a consideration of the nuts and bolts of the storytelling to be found in Kiki De Montparnasse? Why is it that the novel demands a forensic examination of its writer's influences and style, and yet the comicbook can be dismissed with a summary of the plot, a few personal observations and, perhaps, a bare line or two on the art? Even on the net, where comics writing abounds, discussion of all but the most visually eyecatching of pages is exceedingly rare. The result is a culture that barely seems to notice how excellence is so often determined by an excess of competency. It's relatively easy to discuss how Muller & Bocquet's book is a purposeful new biography of Alice "Kiki De Montparnasse" Prin, whose incident-packed life has traditionally been discussed only in the context of the male artists that she knew and often inspired. Similarly, there's little difficulty in discussing the individual and social influences that shaped her fascinating and ultimately tragic life. From the acclaimed creators she intimately knew to her own significant contributions as a painter and performer and writer, Kiki's life is rich in arts-gossip anecdotes. Bohemia? Feminism? The Avant-Garde? Classism? All easy concepts to pay space-filling, points-scoring lip service to. But as to the page-upon-page methods that the artist and writer of Kiki De Montparnasse adopted to keep their readers involved as well as informed, little if anything at all is seen. As essential as social criticism is, it can't in itself substitute for a fascination with how comics work.
3.
As such, I thought I might be forgiven if I briefly discuss one apparently simple and yet highly effective storytelling technique that Muller & Bocquet put to work just three times in the 363 pages of Kiki De Montparnasse. The first of these appears in the page above, which marks Alice 'Kiki' Prin's first appearance in the book as anything but a wailing newly-born. (The year, as we are told, is 1911 and Kiki is on the way to her 10th birthday.) As you can plainly see, the page consists of four characterful close-ups followed by a sudden, gamechanging establishing shot that abruptly places events into a far broader context. The opening quartet of panels succeeds in immediately establishing the young Alice as a formidable, charming, focused performer. Along with that, they also present a series of calculated, snaring enigmas. Why is this girl declaiming poetry? Where is she, given that she might be on-stage or out in the open? Who is it that she's speaking to, given that the direction of her gaze indicates she isn't reciting directly to the reader?
The final frame answers most if not all of those questions. Suddenly we're shown that Alice's love of performing is twinned with a calamitous lack of good judgement. On the one hand, she's shown balanced on a single foot while steadily holding a theatrical pose. Yet on the other, she's posing on the top of an intimidatingly high wall, and her audience of schoolmates are tense with anxiety at the prospect of her falling. It's a captivating scene that does more than simply nail some of the fundamentals of Alice's character while ensuring that the audience reads on to discover her fate. It also foreshadows many of the dominant events of her future life along with establishing some of Muller & Bocquet's key themes. What had previously seemed calm and controlled is revealed to be a far more dangerous enterprise. For the remainder of her life, Alice, or Kiki as she would rechristian herself when in Paris, would play out a series of striking and often-hazardous performances in her private as well as her public affairs. (As Muller has said, "..above all, (Kiki) acted her own life".) In doing so, she'd recklessly pursue the life of a libertine in Bohemian Paris without any heed of consequences. Refusing the roles that conventional society would demand she occupy, Kiki would be model and muse, painter and singer, scene-maker and author, hedonist and regretless, burned-out ex-celebrity. What she would never be is a safety-first observer advising others against the perilous pursuit of pleasure. Up on that intimidatingly high wall is where she'd stay, and it's from there that she'd finally fall.
Even the poem that Alice is acting out is relevant. In a nicely ironic touch, La Fontaine's The Fox and The Crow is a verse reworking of an Aesop fable which warns against the self-interest of flatterers and the dangers of ignoring life's lessons. Kiki would choose to never learn from her mistakes.
4.
The second example of this technique appears some 216 pages later. The year is now 1924 and Kiki has become a major player in Paris' avant-garde. In this page's second and third panels, we're shown Kiki's lover Man Ray being quizzed at a party over his sexual preferences. Pushed to the right-hand side of the frames, Man Ray's appears to be playfully trapped by a gaggle of his party-going peers.The sense is once again of harmless fun. But the fourth panel once again opens up the action in a dramatic fashion. Now Man Ray has gone from being a somewhat reluctant participant to a cornered, friendless entertainment, a curiosity for the distraction of his peers. In pulling back and showing us Man Ray's sudden social isolation, Muller and Bocquet emphasise how the romance and reality of Bohemia could be two very different things. The freedom to reject conventional morality offered by the Montparnasse quarter of Paris didn't mean that 'malicious gossip' was eschewed in favour of respect and compassion. Bohemians could and did gossip just as the bourgeoisie might, and often about the very same private concerns.
Man Ray's surprise and aloneness is accentuated by a series of well-chosen strategies. Most importantly, the establishing shot places Man Ray at the foot of a huge, tall and crowded room. It's a choice that accentuates how weighed down he feels, trapped as he is as the only unsmiling figure at the foot of the frame. Space that had previously seemed compact and sheltered now appears claustrophobic, crowded and indomitable. Our eye is further drawn to him by his dark suit - the only such darkness on the clothes of anyone in sight - which sets him apart from his fellows. As that happens, we note the three lines of discomfort that radiate from his head. They in turn are made all the more obvious by the use of a small framing section of negative space that surrounds him. Finally, while everyone else around him appears relaxed and good-humoured, Man Ray seems untypically tense and defensive.
Of course, on a laudably practical level, the page's final panel also delivers a huge incentive to keep reading. Why is the normally imperturbable Man Ray so shaken, and how will he respond? As always, Muller & Bocquet show that they're doing something other than producing a traditional biography. It's the form of the comic rather than that of a conventional history text that they exploit to tell their story. To idly label Kiki De Montparnasse as 'quirky', as one British newspaper of record did, is to by implication misrepresent a work that's as expertly controlled as it's engrossing and touching. But how could a reviewer avoid doing so, if they simply couldn't recognise the basic language of page-to-page storytelling?
5.
Finally, one last example of the same trick, and of the ways in which gifted, knowledgeable creators can adapt it to a wide variety of purposes. Here the page is composed of a sequence of eight close-ups followed by not one, but two telling, if hardly dramatic, establishing shots. It's now 1940, Kiki is in her late thirties, and her recklessness has led her into drug addiction and incarceration. With her best years as both an artist and an inexhaustible debauchee already behind her, she's shown during the two weeks she unwillingly spent in Salpetriere mental hospital. In total contrast to her first speaking appearance in the book, here she radiates neither purpose or charm. In what's the most text-heavy of these three examples, we're once again shown the disconnection between Kiki's thoughts and her behaviour. The contrast between the painful honesty of her words and the bleakness of her situation is unsettling. By the end of the second row of panels, Kiki's face occupies just a quarter of the frame. No matter how clearheaded her writing, the panels speak of a woman that's crushed by circumstance and oscillating between extremes. As such, her expressions range from despair to boredom to mania as she undergoes an unwilling withdrawal along with the tedium and lonliness of captivity.
Unlike the frames of her first appearance, which contained the light and substance of the wider world as well as the joys of Kiki's daydreaming, now she's caught in narrow, dark panels where even her own words crush down on her. No matter how optimistic she finally appears, it's impossible to believe that she can benefit from her own insight into her troubles. She recognises how boredom has driven her to intoxication and dependence, and yet, she looks forward to an impossible escape to Tahiti with Man Ray. How she might get to the Pacific from Occupied France never crosses her mind, and neither does the fact that she and Man Ray are no longer lovers. Forever relying on luck and others to catch her as she falls, Kiki is now shown to be entirely alone.
That Kiki's coming freedom will fail to bring her happiness appears obvious. Although the penultimate panel does show us the cell she's in and the promise of light through the window, the frame itself is small and its contents joyless. In the two previous examples of this technique, the action has been opened out at last into a far larger and far more dynamic social situation. But here, the first establishing shot is stripped of all bar Kiki's unconvincing, childlike optimism. As she sits small and vulnerable on the shadow-crossed sunlit floor, she has no-one to perform to but herself. As such, she seems painfully fragile and delusional. That's only emphasised by the closing panel, a second establishing shot, which shows Salpetriere mental hospital from the perspective of the outside world. Rather than a scene that promises renewal and happiness, Muller & Bocquet have chosen to show us Kiki's cell as it might be dimly perceived from the outside. The implication is that she'll never truly escape her situation. All paths led back to where she can only be distantly heard and never seen. There's not even any guttering to separate the last two panels. (In all the hundreds of the book's pages, this is a choice on the creator's part that's very rarely made.) Without that, the implication is that time will never pass between the penultimate panel and the final one.The last frame of a chapter, it presents the reader with no page-turning dilemmas, but rather, with a sense of hopelessness.
6.
I'd never suggest that a look at the kind of details I've attempted to discuss here should be present in mainstream reviews. But comics create meaning is a way that's frequently and substantially different to any other medium. To discuss the likes of Kiki De Montparnasse as if it were a standard prose biography is a sad case of the wrong tools being used for a job that's difficult enough in the first place. Worse yet, to treat Muller & Bocquet's epic graphic novel as a pleasantly distracting and quirky history primer is to show a massive degree, unwittingly or not, of contempt. Put simply, Kiki De Montparnasse is a comic book, and a very fine comic book, and it needs to be paid attention to as exactly that.
Catel Muller & Jose-Luis Bocquet's "Kiki De Montparnasse" is published by SelfMadeHero books. It's a wonderful graphic novel. I don't think you could loose out by reading it.
Posted 6th July 2015 by Colin Smith
Labels: Jose-Luis Bocquet Kiki De Montparnasse.Catel Muller