A clear domain, the outside of a luxury space-cruiser.
Translated from Danish (not his native tongue) to English (not his native tongue either) by Nicolai Langfeldt, and I tell you, with that vocabulary and phrasing, it was bloody hard to translate.
By Pierre Christin
On the face of it seems simple enough
The drawer Jean-Claude Mézières takes a central place in the French comic. Central, precisely - no more, no less.
One can for example say that he style wise is in the more conservative part of the avant-garde that revolutionized the genre in the years 1960-1970: The innovations are many and obvious in Jean-Claudes work, but he never lets go of tradition.
If you take this point of view farther you can also say that he is a border dweller, in the same way that those workers that live in Tournai in Belgium or Rocroi in France, and every day travel from one country to another, because their work demands it. But watch out: it has nothing to do with what one later were to call ``La ligne claire'' (the clean line), that were invented by false Belgians, that needed a story telling technique that could twist it to their advantage. When Jean-Claude debuted in Pilote in 1966 he was first and foremost a Frenchman looking for a original way to express himself graphically, but with a solid respect for the previous epochs great masters, in the same way that everyday French painters in the 19th century acknowledged their debt to the older Flemish school.
A central place also because Jean-Claude's work never has invited extremes of neither praise nor criticism. It has never been at the forefront of fads, but also never been clearly mainstream. It has certainly never been forgotten and detested either, and especially these ``mézièresian'' drawings, in their intense modesty, have never been surpassed, and now in the 80's they are right in the middle of the heart of comics.
One can also claim that his drawings belong in the indisputably clear domain: no unnecessary details, striving to give the drawings archetypical simplicity, - too simple maybe, for those that are easily blinded by volatile trends.
And yet - the technical virtuosity in these refined drawings deny any naivité, all innocence! Jean-Claude keeps well away from the overloading of a Druillet, from the festoons, arabesques, the overwhelming decorations that so many draweres hide behind, from the elegant clarity and unreal perfectionism that is Moebius' gift, and that has evolved to foolish worship in his imitatores. Without going to any extremes, what Jean-Claude offeres - discreet but undeniable - is a new way to relate to a drawing.
A clear domain, the outside of a luxury space-cruiser.
What he does - without breaking down the framework of his predecessores put up - is to introduce unique new elements in his stories, but they always have ties to the past of comics or other forms of art. Total knowledge of the techniques of comics, a taste for cinemagraphic and art historic quotes, knowledge of the language of architecture, passion for the forms of nature, living as well as dead, and a gift for social analysis resting on a visual base: these are presumably un-unitable elements that make Jean-Claudes drawings - even when not at their best - something consistent and definitive. Something that cannot be copied (even though many have tried and with very different motives at that).
Briefly stated, everything is simple because it is the simplicity of clarity. And to such a degree that for the hasty reader, the drawing is almost visible - and is that not the highest goal for a drawing - to be invisible, because it's function is to illustrate, not to exhibit itself.
But still, it's not that simple. Because beyond the seeming transparency of Jean-Claude Mézières style, it is rational choices as well as dark desires, compelling engagements and occult mysteries that is the inner power of the stories.
...
...
The basic myths of his pictorial world is the myth of the Wild West. It is not by chance that even in outer space his settleres, his hunteres, his soldieres - even his robots - are equipped with American physiognomies. But careful! The myths he use for support are rich, complete, at once full of fantasies, nurtured by reality, enlarged by Hollywood, and brought into focus by direct observation, dream based and in the end political.
The Wild West we know - and this goes for Jean-Claude too - is the Wild West of the free man in a virgin nature waiting to be taken, at the time one could smell both human and animal sweat of labour, a time when optimism seethed through body and soul when one beheld the sky above, before starting at the days work. But also a time when women and weak were pushed aside, Indians suppressed or exterminated, nature destroyed, a time of execution squads in Salt Lake City, Mormons hypocrisy, and the war always threatening with it's missiles in silos out in the desert.
That means that in choosing the Wild West as point of departure in his exploration of the world, at a important time in his youth, before he became a comic artist, Jean-Claude has gotten a practical and theoretical knowledge both necessary and sufficient to tell of the rest of the univerese.
Without exhaustive enumeration I can mention some of the elements of this knowledge. Pioneer spirit confronted with barren earth: Jean-Claudes creative process builds upon bio technical studies of the hard task rather than the cheerful artists hocus-pocus, and every drawing, considered, and in the fullness of time drawn, and redrawn ten times, looked after and cared for like a English Country Garden.
The powerful feelings for the endless space, neither hostile nor inviting, but meant to be inhabited: The endless domain of matter, that is neither larger nor smaller that the creatures that lives within it, good or evil, but that in any case is taken seriously in the reproduction of the fictitious ethnographic details.
Acknowledging of the alien to the degree of making it divine: The plants and creatures of space, distant planets non-human inhabitants are handled with the utmost respect of their differences and you can save the trouble of looking for prejudice, at once pitiful and scary, that is evident in so many science fiction stories.
OK! You
can come out now... the photographer has left...
And finally the firm belief in certain values based on his own peresonal experience: The abomination of war and hate of military systems, the despise of systems that suppress the individual, the sympathy for the humble, lack of trust in the government, the shy awe of femininity (synonymous with the beauty you rarely see, and also the courage and true decisiveness that are equally rarely seen) and the undeniable disliking of all worship of virility (brutality, noise, speed, metal, hunt, and always, always aggression).
All this he conveys in his very own way. At once slow and invisible, unrelenting and courteous. (Translatores note: hmm, does that make sense?). There is something of an ascetic in Jean-Claude Mézières, yes, even a recluse, and it is not by chance that the places he work look like the refuge of a mystic, that has always felt drawn towards the desert.
Yes, maybe it's all very simple in the case of Jean-Claude Mézières, drawer. But one has surely underestood that this simplicity has nothing to do with being a simpleton. It's the result of the kindness and freedom in a pereson that is in the middle of life, and in the middle of a art from that fascinates him. When it comes to comics, they are definitively not the center of the univerese, but they are one of the things that makes the world go around. And the just drawing, that is perhaps more a drawing of a just human, is not without significance when it comes to making the world go around in a slightly less crooked way.
Valentin: Ah, here we are Linda, it has a big cavity in a molar... it
isn't all that strange that it has been a bit grumpy
Linda: Hurry! I'm beginning to get tired