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La Malle Sanderson, Jean-Claude Götting
posted November 8, 2005
 



By Bart Beaty

This weekend I found a buried treasure. A book that I bought about a year ago, which I had been so eager to read that I had put it somewhere I'd be sure not to forget. Then, of course I promptly forgot about it, only to turn it up when I was sorting through some papers. How did I forget to read Jean-Claude Götting's La Malle Sanderson for a year? Well, the problem is that Gotting comes and goes like that.

If you'd asked me 15 years ago to name the five best living cartoonists, I am positive that Götting would have been on that list. Coming off the success of his exquisite Futuropolis-published comics, he had revealed himself to be an artist interested in telling subtle, moving, human stories with a remarkable illustratorly touch. Books like La Fille du modele (1988) and L'Option Stravinski (1990) ranked in my mind with the greatest comics ever made. I was looking forward to his long and productive comics career.

Sadly, it's been 15 years since Götting drew another comic. In that intervening years he's published numerous books of his drawings and paintings, several beautiful children's books, and has even written a comic (Rebecca), but he has shied away from producing new comics work on his own. La Malle Sanderson is the book I've been waiting for all these years.

The 100-page graphic novel is set in Paris and New York during the mid-1930s. Sanderson, an escape artist and mentalist, performs his magic for well-dressed bourgeois audiences. Invited to a dinner party, he falls for a wealthy married woman, and the book traces the consequences of their affair. The story is slight but powerful. The romance happens quickly and with little in the way of explanation, not unlike a Cary Grant romance from the same era. The ending, while not entirely unexpected, carries a disturbing gravitas. In plot terms, the whole thing feels not unlike something that you might see on Turner Classic Movies on a Tuesday morning.



What carries the book, though, is the art. Götting is probably better known for his illustrations (The New Yorker, etc.) than for his comics these days, and that is because he has such an enchanting visual style. His comics are painted in black, white and grey, with thick distinctive lines and softly evoked backgrounds. I can assure you that on every page there is at least one panel that will leave you breathless, and when he trots out the occasional full-page vista it almost stops the narrative dead.

The limited color scheme works well here because Götting's comics actually do feel like a black-and-white movie, partly because of the subject matter and historical era, and partly because his work is visually richer and fuller than most of his black-and-white comics contemporaries.

So, was it worth the wait? Oh, absolutely. Götting has re-entered the comics arena without missing a step. It's like those 15 years just flew by. But I hope he doesn't make us wait that long again.

Bart Beaty is the English language's top writer about modern European comics. Learn about his new book here, and contact him .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) He will soon be doing rhetorical battle on this site against Charles Hatfield in a special series of e-mailed debates.