Bogie


By Claude Jean-Philippe & Patrick Lesueur, translated by Wendy Payton (Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 978-0-913035-78-8

As well as a far greater appreciation of, and looser, more accommodating definitions for performing and popular arts, the French just seem to cherish the magnificent ephemera of entertainment; examining and revisiting the icons and landmarks of TV, film, modern music and comics in ways that English-speakers just don’t seem capable of.

At the beginning of the 1980s artist Patrick Lesueur collaborated with author Claude Jean Philippe on a graphic series of biographies featuring Movie Stars who changed the world: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn and the subject of this slim and beautiful chronicle translated for America by West Coast independent publisher Eclipse.

Even Wikipedia doesn’t throw up much about the writer but Lesueur began life as a window dresser before moving into bande dessinée in 1972 by joining the creative staff of Pilote, illustrating current affairs pages before moving into fiction with short eco-fables compiled as the album ‘En Attendant le Printemps’ and cop thriller ‘Reste-t-il du Miel pour le Thé’. Latterly he produced ‘Detroit’, ‘Douglas Dunkerk’, and classic car feature ‘Enzo Ferrari, l’Homme aux Voitures Rouges’.

Bogie is told in a haunting, conversationally first-person narrative: the moodily realistic yet whimsically refined life of one of the greatest screen gods of all time comes to elegiac life in this peculiarly down-beat and low-key piece, all the more fascinating because the tale unfolds in an engagingly static manner but actually sounds just like you’d want and expect Humphrey Bogart to talk to you if you met him in a bar, whilst the restrained yet powerfully effective images shout “private photograph album” in a candid, winningly intimate way.

Bogart apparently led an unremarkable life off-screen, or perhaps the creators just didn’t want this hard-drinking, much-married legend to outshine his own celluloid legacy, but in terms of graphic novel entertainment this poetic picture-story in a stunning achievement and worthy of your attention. Perhaps someday soon another publisher will re-release it and even translate those other silver screen sagas too…
Contents © 1984 Dargaud Editeur Paris by Claude Jean Philippe and Patrick Lesueur. 1989 This edition © 1989 Eclipse Books.