* L'inconnu de Bazooka. Édition Ragage. 80 pages. (épuisé. Éditeur disparu !) Pages BD & dessins Actuel, Libé, Echo, Bulletin périodique, Activité Sexuelle Normale, Cahiers du cinéma ... Photos : Alain Bizos
Masters of the ninth art. Édition Liverpool University Press. Matthew Screech. 250 pages. Couverture Jean Rouzaud extraite de "Una verdadera del tio José". Magazine "Activité Sexuelle Normale" (Bazooka Prod chez Almond Press) signé José Perfeccion.
On page 1 of ‘Una Verdadera del Tio ]osé’ a dissipated-looking man (]osé, one assumes) smokes a joint, not a pipe, in pleasant surroundings: there are trees, flying birds and a hilltop castle, which suggests a romanticised view of the past. The setting looks agreeably rustic, yet it is also apparently urban: however, ]osé’s city, unlike. Oncle Paul’s, is cluttered up with billboards advertising various consumer products. The caption reads: ‘Tu te promenes dans la rue. Rien de spécial a faire.’ In the picture below, ]osé walks past a photo-montage which has advertisements for cigarettes, seedy cabarets and strip clubs. On the next page, a critique of sexist attitudes and of the ninth art’s (mostly male) readership is implied, in gross language which is said to be that of the readers themselves a woman stands on a pedestal marked ‘prix phallo 1976’, while a text reads ‘chatte, moule, con, figue... ces mots ont été les votres" the text runs up the " left~hand margin, making conventional left-to-right reading impossible. On page 3 language loses its meaning. Pictures of people in the street and on the metro are accompanied by a text that says: ‘]e m’suis acheté un costard en Alpaga, en Alpego, en Al Capone, en Alpages, en Alpoggi’ etc. The last page is a huge, finely detailed picture of a crowd of people, drawn in a broad range of styles from Disney to photo-realism. The picture contains, among much else, a pregnant Brigitte Bardot, Yul Brynner with a shiny head of hair, and a woman who says: ‘Bonjour Corto, c’est moi: la tentatrice chauve’. Her words are not gratuitous and they say much about RouZaud’s influences. The woman is referring to Hugo Pratt’s adventure comic about a wandering sailor, Corto Maltese; she is also referring to the Absurdist playwright Eugene lonesco’s Cantatrice chauve (1950).
|