Comic strip: happy with a spring

; DAY

Two major surprises launch this most promising editorial spring: a 100% Quebec manga and the return to our shelves of Jimmy Beaulieu, a key figure in the 9e national art.

Since the publication of Roles de compositionspublished by Mécanique générale in 2016, artist-teacher-editor Jimmy Beaulieu has been busy. The one-man band of Quebec comics has produced a dozen titles in confidential print runs distributed outside the usual book network. 

Although not essential to the understanding of his “official” corpus, these fragments nicely consolidate the bases, creating in the same breath in readers the exhilarating impression of participating in a treasure hunt. Beaulieu has a unique way of making books. He chooses the assembly of sketches published in different collectives and fanzines which form a script and thematic cohesion, rather than the classic construction of a story.

A GREAT HARVEST 

The fifteen intimate stories produced over more than ten years and patiently sown to the four winds that constitute this fruitful harvest of the Garden of complexes generate a great vintage.  

“ This album is the continuation of the previous ones, both my fictions and my autobiographies. It is both an extension and a return,” explains the artist. “At the same time, Jardin des complexes could very well be the first album of a reader. ” 

Indeed, the “Beaulieuesque” mythology can be approached by any of his works, as long as we let ourselves be carried away by our feelings. 

In this new delivery, the author has fun blurring the tracks by alternating fictional and biographical sections. “When you do fiction, it's autobiography in disguise, whether it's Star Wars, the Alfred Hitchcock films or Tintin in Tibet . I am always one or two of my characters. Sometimes I want to stage it in space or at the bottom of the water. Why not. Especially since it breathes life and elements of surprise into the book.  »

Great return than that of Beaulieu, therefore, which gives us a powerful, sensitive, militant album. Because the characters – just like their creator moreover – refuse unbridled consumerism, choosing beauty instead. 

We receive this book like the embrace of the painting Date Night< /em> (1956) by the Russian painter Anatoly Kuvin, which also recalls the graphic spirit of certain passages of Everything continues, a poignant story that admirably closes our reading. We come out of this reading with our hearts fully inflated and our minds airy, like a life-saving gulp of air from the St. Lawrence River taken from the shore of Île d'Orléans.