Drawn & Quarterly

 

Drawn & Quarterly, an almost quar­terly peri­od­i­cal pub­lished in Montreal, is the classi­est comics anthol­ogy on the mar­ket. Each issue has knock­out sto­ries, rich-but-never-slick art work, and gen­er­ous design, paper and print­ing. Vol. 2, No. 3 (May 1995) is wrapped in jazzy cubist/deco/ultra-postmodern cover and end­pa­pers by J. D. King, and has four great sto­ries inside. The first is “Johnny and Babe” by Graham Chaffee. In sparkly black-and-white frames, Babe works on the roof and tells Johnny the story of the prodi­gal son, while another nar­ra­tive — about Fernando and his beloved wife, April May June — unfolds inter­mit­tently in full-page water­colour pan­els. The piece is lay­ered and mys­te­ri­ous, but not arty. “Bicycle Thief” by Pentti Otsamo, a Finnish comics artist, is about a stolen bicy­cle, urban alien­ation and exis­ten­tial despair — all in six pages. The pan­els are painted in muted colours, and they look almost abstract until you notice each brush­stroke is jam-packed with infor­ma­tion. Canada’s own Maurice Vellekoop wrote and drew “Side Door Lover” in hand-tinted –post­card ‘50s camp-romp style (“Beau!! You? Here? But how on earth?” “At last I’ve found you!”). But it’s got steak as well as siz­zle. The roman­tic leads in the story are men, and nobody bats an eye. With the light­est touch, Vellekoop lam­poons romance, lust, het­ero­sex­ism, fam­ily — you name it. “It Was the War of the Trenches” by Jacques Tardi (trans­lated by Kate Sibbald) is set in France, Tardi’s home­land, dur­ing World War One. The draw­ings are haunt­ing black-white-and-greys on hor­i­zon­tal pan­els, stacked up three to a page like cin­ema screens. Tardi rants in voice-over: “And you, sol­dier from Indochina, the French have surely shown you their coun­try! … Forty years from now a lit­tle gully far from here will serve as the com­mon grave for the sol­diers of the French army, and the German legion­naires among them, that you will sur­round and kill as you lib­er­ate your coun­try.” This kind of talk can get sen­ti­men­tal or preachy, but here, sur­rounded by rats and mud and corpses and charred trees and maimed, bro­ken men, the words bring the “Great War” right to the present. I hope Tardi’s gov­ern­ment is pay­ing atten­tion. In this num­ber and all oth­ers, Drawn & Quarterly presents mate­r­ial that busts out of the term “comics” and leaves it in the dust.