Yesterday’s Papers: A Crowded Life in Comics

Saturday, April 20, 2019

A Crowded Life in Comics –

Paris Is Burning

by Rick Marschall

Caran d'Ache

I will take a little detour this week. These columns are largely personal – the running title gives me away – but I intend to present a fairly comprehensive, and behind-the-scenes, history of comics of the past 50 years or so.

This week, as Easter might distract us, properly so; and with the images of Notre Dame still seared in our minds, I will stroll down a largely pictorial lane.

I have been to Paris at least two dozen times, and visited Notre Dame at least half those times. Alone, as art historian and as gawking tourist; with family and with special friends; alone for concerts and worship. My pied-à-terre is the Hotel Esmeralda, directly across the Seine.

It is impossible not to love Paris. Comics historian Pierre Couperie wrote a book about Paris through the ages (it was published in America too, by George Braziller), each double-spread with a map of the village-turned-metropolis, surrounded by historical facts and data. On one visit he took me around Paris, held up old prints of certain sites – from the precise vantage-point where we stood, and related some history for me and my video camera.

Many friends, all related to comics, in the city. Nicole Lambert, who created the incomparable color strip Les Triplets (the cute upper-class tykes) for Madame Figaro… and animated cartoons, apparel, games, etc. Former model in the US, a wonderful friend back in her native France. I will profile her soon here.

Yves Rasquin ran the amazing comic shops called Album. His shop near my hotel was always my meeting place, and in 1991, when I was the American rep for the Angouleme Festival – arranging events in Paris, Angouleme, and Paris again for more than 125 cartoonists from the US – Yves hosted a memorable reception in his shop.

Pierre Couperie, who was a professor in Paris, has since died. So, too, and too young, Annie Baron-Carvais, student of comics and friend of cartoonists from the world over.

And so forth. Restaurants, concert venues, museums, parks. Concerts – performances of Fauré’s Requiem; the Bach organ cycle over weeks on the city’s many church organs. Memories… none more precious than Notre Dame; incomparable. I cried, literally, as I watched on European TV channels the unholy holocaust. Personally, I believe the cause is yet to be learned; and I pray the restoration is just that – and not a further secularized Lego-built theme park.

Gee, I promised a brief and pictorial stroll. Too late for brief; but I will present some images now. Not strips or cartoons. I have complete runs of L’Assiette au Beurre and other French graphics/ cartoon journals… but they mostly are anti-clerical. Not for this week.

I also have a complete run of Figaro Illustré, 1892-1911 its glory days as an oversized, full color deluxe magazine of graphics, fiction, and art. In its amazing pages are special issues devoted to the new aeroplanes and automobiles; other cities like Rome and Berlin; historical themes, and holidays. In its pages, too, are works, much of them original for the magazine, by Mucha; Toulouse-Lautrec; Monet; Caran d’Ache; poster pioneer Jules Cheret; JOB; even the Americans E N Blue and Hy Mayer.

The volumes are too monstrous and heavy to try for the scan bed, so I took some photos of covers and spreads to share this week. A time when France, and the world, was more innocent; when artists celebrated more than their own dark sides; when Impressionism and Art Nouveau excited artists and public alike. Click twice to enlarge these. Please forgive the distortions of the camera.

And breathe a Vive la France while we can.