TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Blutch

taking topprizeatAngoulême, France’s largest comics festival. He had already shown himself to be a stylistic virtuoso, but still wore his influences—Will Eisner, Daniel Goossens, Morris (creator of Lucky Luke ), Jean-Claude Forst (creator of Barbarella )—on his sleeve. Fresh off a successful run at the satirical revue Fluide Glaciale , he turned to another publication instrumental in making Franco-Belgian comics the art form it is today: the aptly named À Suivre (Stay Tuned), which in its heyday had hosted the talents of Moebius, Jacques Tardi, Hugo Pratt, Muñoz and Sampayo, Peeters and Schuiten. “I’d had enoughof parodies, theconstant nods to this and that, the innuendo and authorial winks,” Blutch remarked, “all the mental crockery and referential baggage, the byzantine architecture of humor. I needed todosomethingpure, strippeddown, fresherand more direct.” What better source than antiquity? Blutch set out to create the sequel to a beloved book he’d “never wanted to end”: the Satyricon . Already a motley tonal medly—prose and verse, comedy and tragedy, romance and satire—Petronius’ novel has survived only in fragments, a condition Blutch found conducive to leaving his artistic mark. “The people were all naked; all I had to drawwas bodies moving through space. Peplum paved the way to a kind of musical physicality for me, a path I’ve been following ever since.” What began as investigative and imaginative reconstruction soon became free improvisation: Satyricon remixed, if you will. Names are changed or dropped. Lines are plucked from context—what was once narration becomes the characters’ commentary on their own actions. Petronius compares a city without culture to a pestilential field; Blutch turns it into an actual physical setting. 176