By Anouk Ricard, translated by Helge Dascher (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-138-3
Here’s another superb example of sophisticated yet simple Euro-cartooning designed to charm and challenge in equal amounts.
Couched in British TV terms, this beautifully bonkers animorphic fable of modern life is akin to watching David Brent guest star in Little Britain whilst apparently coming down off a mixed selection of unsanctioned recreational pharmaceuticals, but for those with better things to do than stay glued to the goggle box, here’s a more informative, longer-winded appreciation…
Anouk Ricard is an extremely gifted storyteller, author, artist and animator who hails from Istres in the South of France. Her creative output ranges from puzzles to films, book and magazine illustration to science tracts and much, much more.
Her comic albums – both for children and adult audiences – have garnered many awards and nominations, with the all-ages Anna and Froga series (2004) and Galaxy Darling (2009, with Hugo Piette in Spirou) particularly popular amongst critics and the public.
She was born in 1970 and graduated from the Arts décoratifs de Strasbourg in 1995 before beginning her multi-directional career. Now based in Lyon, 2012 saw Ricard win a raft of awards and honours for Coucous Bouzon, a wryly surreal anthropomorphic satirical parody on modern day office practice and politics.
The disturbing and hilarious lampoon, delivered as a calculatedly naïve, faux juvenile soap opera melodrama, is now available in English and will presumably be racking up a few more gongs and trophies…
Benson’s Cuckoos produces and distributes those bird-themed clocks loved and loathed in equal amounts by holidaygoers everywhere, and our cautionary tale begins when highly strung Richard (he’s the blue duck on the cover) goes for an interview for an office position which has suddenly and mysteriously become vacant.
The encounter is a nightmare. Mr. Benson is erratic, unfocused and quite emotionally detached – and possibly completely mad. Told to turn up on Monday, Richard leaves the interview unsure whether he has got the job or not…
His first day is even stranger. For starters he has to provide his own computer and the first colleague he meets threatens him sexually…
Dragged into a staff meeting within minutes of setting up, he meets receptionist Sophie who tells him how George – the person he’s replacing – simply vanished one day. She seems nice but won’t let him sit in George’s chair…
The day goes downhill from there and the job appears less and less appealing as the hours pass. Almost everybody is terse and self-absorbed when not outright hostile and Benson roams around wearing strange hats and alternately threatening to fire everybody and over-sharing uncomfortable personal observations.
The next day, pressured for a progress report, Richard opens a fresh can of worms when he innocently asks to see George’s old files. Amidst an aura of sullen intractability, Sophie takes pity on him and passes on an old one but it mysteriously vanishes from his desk before he can read it…
Feeling disturbed he stops in for a session with his analyst but the self-absorbed charlatan just fobs him off with a fresh prescription for antidepressants.
Desperate for a little respite when he arrives home, Richard collapses on the couch and turns on the TV.
There’s a Crimewatch style show on. Lost and Found is featuring the case of a wife whose husband never came home from work. His name was George McCall and he was the Accounts Manager at Benson’s Cuckoos…
The next day the film crew turns up at work and all too soon Richard and Sophie are exposed to the harsh and unjust scrutiny of trial by media…
From there the strange tale inescapably escalates into a bizarre and paranoiac crime-caper punctuated by a succession of further odd events and mysterious disappearances which inexorably reduce our reluctant hero to the status of an alienated, disoriented and powerless player in a grand conspiracy.
Moreover, for Richard and Sophie the course of true love runs anything but smooth before the hyper-surreal and increasingly absurdist drama is concluded…
Moody, calculatedly deranged and feeling like Kafka seen through rainbow-tinted spectacles, Benson’s Cuckoos is a sublime psychological fantasy, an enticingly funny comic treatise on the hidden perils of being a grown up and a grand old-fashioned mystery thriller that will delight any reader smart enough to realise that ducks don’t use computers but can always find some way to get into trouble…
© 2014 Anouk Ricard. Translation © 2014 Helge Dascher. All rights reserved.