EDWARD GAUVIN

A short stateside tour: popping up at, among other places, NY Comic Con. Forgive the absence–too luddite, or is it lazy? to post from the road. Happy Lunar New Year, best wishes to all believers for the pig days ahead. Snow country, here I come.

* Two new translations by yours truly up at Words Without Borders, the Online Magazine of International Literature, as their first ever Graphic Issue, long in the offing, becomes a reality this month. O frabjous day! Treats for lovers of la B.D. dit avant-garde, as L’Association founding member Jean-Christophe Menu would have it, or alternative Euro-comics, as they might say in the States. Which means no tights. An excerpt from La Bombe Familiale, by French comics superstar David B., best known in English for his epic Epileptic and his appearances in Fantagraphics’ Mome, thanks to the tireless efforts of the polyglot Kim Thompson. A short first published by L’Asso in their Patte de Mouche collection back in distant ’97, it tells the humane and absurd tale of a city in the shadow of war, and the dangers of befriending missiles. David B.’s bold blacks and whites, as ever, combine unease, imagination, and storybook immediacy.
Favorites of The Comic’s Reporter‘s Bart Beaty since their début, the Belgians Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot, who walked off with this year’s Best Newcomer Award at Angoulême for their Panier de Singe (L’Association, coll. Ciboulette), penned a short, “Les Pharaons d’Égypte“, from the January 2005 issue of Les Réquins Marteaux‘s revue Ferraille Illustré. The duo upend traditional time and space within the panels of this nightmarish social invective; their faceless characters achieve a worrisome menace. I hope I’ve done justice to the almost Beckettian exchange of banalities, the patter populating their pages. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s wonderful, as I fly into a new translation for First Second Books, to know I’ll once more have the intrepid and dependable Alexis Siegel on wing, ready to blast any tricky French from the sky before it blindsides me. I call him my mentor, though never to his face; he’d surely decline the title.

The target, this time, is yet another collection from the mind of the ever-zany and hyperprolific Lewis Trondheim. I’ve never seen the Nicktoons import version, though the books are predictably uproarious. Trondheim is one of the great French humorists, right up there with Francis Veber in my book, though my favorite thing he’s done would still be Farniente, a slim book from L’Asso with art by Dominique Hérody: a quiet series of witty, wistful conversations between a husband and wife on vacation, he the pessimist, she, well, une française. » Read the rest of this entry «

Le Hong Kong qui m’a ébloui, dès que je suis descendu de l’avion pour me retrouver dans l’humidité étouffante de 99%, a disparu, cédant sa place à une ville désormais familière, connue de tous ces films que me poussait à voir cette fascination initiale, née de ma visite en été ‘97, lors de sa remise à la Chine. J’ai beau le chercher, il n’existe plus. De temps en temps me viennent des tours de la ville présente, en vision fugitive, les contours de cette autre, alors terriblement exotique, dont l’étrangeté m’avait englouti, et je me rappelle que dans cette ville des gratte-ciels, ne resplendissant que d’argent boursier, se mire quelque chose comme le monde de l’avenir tel que le concevrait un garçon de cinq ans, où se lancent, des grands boulevards, les escaliers évidemment mécaniques dans une course aux passerelles élancées, tapissées de transporteurs, qui sillonnent la métropole des tours étincelants. Une légèreté presque utopienne, comme la bénédiction du soleil, surgirait de cette ville dont les résidents, pour la traverser, n’avait nullement besoin de mettre pied sur terre.

The most excellent Dave Baxter of Broken Frontier has this to say about my work on Archaia’s Okko series by Hub, launched last month (Aie! Last year already!):

“It should also be noted that the translation of dialogue and caption box by Edward Gauvin is one of the best European genre fiction has yet received in the American comic market, and the infamously stilted dialogue and prose of past imported series is happily, conspicuously missing.” » Read the rest of this entry «