September 28, 2006
Go, Read: Chris Mautner on Sempe

Chris Mautner follows up his previous piece on the First Second Fall 2006 slate with another article encapsulating the Fall comics season in broad strokes:
a look at Phaidon's efforts to bring Jean-Jacques Sempe's cartooning and illustration to North American audiences. Mautner has it right that the heart of this effort is
a suite of cartoon collections -- two from early in the cartoonist's career, and two from late.
Sempe's work exhibits a wonderful quality that I think if seen by enough comics readers and cartoonists here could quietly contribute to a re-exploration of the comics panel. Like
Charles Addams, Sempe is a master of displays of wider context. Your eye is immediately captured by the central idea of the drawing and then expands outward, eventually catching an incidental detail that turns the whole thing on its head or ratchets up the absurdity. It's an interesting way to work, particularly when comics narratives are in a phase marked by every bit of new information being given a place in time. On top of that vastly underutilized artistic effect, Sempe's drawing is lovely, his work runs a gamut of approaches from reverie to social criticism, and he works extremely well with limited instances of color. I hope these books end up on a lot of library shelves.
posted 12:44 am PST |
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