Another comic Paul Gravett covers in his Previews is Self Made Hero’s edition of David Prudhomme’s prizewinning graphic novel Rebetiko, in a wonderful translation by Nora Mahony, who also did David B.’s Black Paths and Frédérik Peeters and Pierre-Oscar Lévy’s Sandcastle for them.
Prudhomme takes us through a day and night of carousing, womanizing, hashish-smoking, and music-making for a group of four musicians during which life decisions are made and reaffirmed.  The characters are all based on real people: Piraeus’s famous rebetiko band comprising Markos Vamvakaris, Giorgos Batis, Anestos Delias and Stratos Payioumtzis. Prudhomme replaced Payioumtzis with a character called Stavros, who in many ways resembles Yiannis Papaioannou (though he never played with any of the members in that group). The story takes place in Athens, October 1936, a few months into the military regime of Ioannis Metaxas. As Matthias Wivel writes in The Comics Journal,
“Their hashish-driven, devil-may-care lifestyle is fully congruent with later rock ’n’ roll-archetypes, and is given an acute edge by their dislocation from the new political order. Targets of suspicion and subject to censorship by the authorities for their subversive lyrics and Ottoman-derived music, they become romantic anti-establishment figures for Prudhomme. The story thus shows them in conflict with the police, with the gangsters sharing their immediate environment and with capitalism in the form of an American A&R man hoping to record and preserve their unique music for a mass audience.â€
The right wing persecuted rebetiko, considering it an expression of the proletariat, while the left also lambasted it for “contributing to the decline of the working classes, the left had a duty to exalt.†Perhaps most famously in America we owe rebetiko the song “Misirlou,†re-popularized in the ‘90s by Pulp Fiction.
I enjoyed working on an excerpt of this book for Words Without Borders in 2010. With lyrics writ large and floating ghostly over scenes of darkened café interiors, it provides a new formal take on that old challenge of representing music, or at least musicality, in comics. Kim Deitch does it well; Prudhomme provides the suggestion of sung words that escape or transcend the balloons containing speech (and less popularly these days, thought). As if the spoken word (or thought) had parameters, a bounded discourse, while lyrics, approximately diegetic and superimposed on successive panels, belong to everyone in the room. » Read the rest of this entry «