Mitchum

Description

A star of French comics imagines America--its movie stars, its history, its fashion--in these tantalizing graphic short stories about everything from love to, yes, the actor Robert Mitchum. Blutch is one of the most inventive storytellers in comics, and nothing reveals it like Mitchum. Serialized and collected in the mid-90s and never before available in English, this is Blutch at his most wide-ranging- from Puritan fever dreams to an encounter with a shape-shifting Robert Mitchum, Blutch builds stories out of his dreams, visions of America, and anything else he can get his hands on. Drawn in his unmistakable line that veers in a moment from crude to elegant, blotchy to crisp, horrific to serene, these comics show Blutch searching for new artistic frontiers. What he finds is sometimes surprising, occasionally unsettling, and endlessly fascinating.

Blutch (Christian Hincker) is an award-winning, highly influential French cartoonist. He has published almost two dozen books since his 1988 comic debut in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial, including Le Petit Christian, So Long, Silver Screen, and Peplum (available from NYR Comics). His illustrations appear in Les Inrockuptibles, Liberation, and The New Yorker. Matt Madden is a translator and cartoonist. He is the author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story- Exercises in Style, which is a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, and of two textbooks co-written with his wife, Jessica Abel, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and Mastering Comics. Madden and Abel were series editors of The Best American Comics for six years. He translated Edmond Baudoin's graphic novel Piero for New York Review Books. He lives in Philadelphia.

"[I]t's the art which makes Blutch so enticing. His thick chalks and scratchy pens result in smoky environments and characters that, though captured on the page, display a great sense of movement. . . . Blutch may not be quintessentially French, but the vibrant, vibrating bodies of Mitchum are quintessentially Blutch." -Nicholas Burman, The Quietus "One of our greatest artists." -L'Express "[Blutch's] work has tremendously inspired myself and an endless line of cartoonists, humbled by the virtuosity of [his] lush brushwork. It's long overdue for [his] books to be translated into English." -Craig Thompson "In the hands of the amazing Mr. Hincker (who uses the pseudonym Blutch), a simple pencil takes on the qualities of a magic wand." -The New York Times "One of the greatest living cartoonists (and if you don't think Blutch fits this bill you really, really need to read more Blutch)." -The Comics Reporter "One of the most important European cartoonists of the past 20 years." -Robot 6