By Renaud Dillies, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163758-4
Renaud Dillies belongs to that cool school of European artists who are keenly aware of the visual power imbued by using anthropomorphic characters in grown up stories – a notion we’ve all but lost here in Britain and one primarily used for kiddie comics and pornography in the USA and Asia.
Dillies was born in Lille in 1972, the inveterate dreamer, artist and storyteller in a brood of five kids. Music was a big part of his parents’ lives: British Pop – especially The Beatles and John Lennon – and Jazz, mostly Big Band, Swing and Satchmo, and the lad listened and learned…
After college – studying Humanities, Graphic and Decorative arts at Saint-Luc School of Fine Arts in Tournai – he began his comics career, like so many others, at Spirou, drawing backgrounds for prolific cartoonist Frédéric Jannin (Rockman, Germain et Nous and many more) and also inking Frédéric “Clarke†Seron on sorceress comedy Mélusine.
The young author blended his twin passions for comics and music in his first solo work and Betty Blues – published by Paquet in 2003 – took the “Best Debut†award at that year’s Angoulême Comics Festival.
He followed up with Sumato, Mister Plumb (with Régis Hautière) and Mélodie du Crépuscule (Melody of Twilight) before moving to Darguad in 2009 to and create Bulles et Nacelle with Christophe Bouchard (available in English as Bubbles and Gondola) and, in 2011, Abélard (again with Hautière and also available in translation from NBM/ComicsLit).
During this period he still toiled as a jobbing Bande Dessinées creator. Under the pen-name “Jack†he drew comedy sports features Les Foot Maniacs and Tout sur le Rugby for Bamboo and illustrated some Arboris’ erotic short stories for the series Salut les coquinas.
Coming from the same dark place and cultural sources as Benoît Sokal’s wry, bleak and witty Inspector Canardo detective duck tales, Betty Blues is both paean and elegy to the unholy trinity of Modern Cool and Shattered Idealisms: Noir, Jazz and Lost Love, all focused through the mythologizing lens of cinematic Fifties Americana.
The tragic, flawed star of this intoxicating fable is Little Rice Duck, possibly the greatest bird ever to blow a trumpet in the seedy clubs and wild environs of the West Wood. Starring at the nightspots and making music are his life but his hot girlfriend Betty is getting pretty tired playing second fiddle to his art.
She’s a pretty bird who needs lots of loving attention, the Good Life and Expensive Champagne, so on one more tedious night when Rice is deep in the spotlight blowing hot and loud, she calamitously listens to an unctuous, sleazy fat cat at the bar who offers her plenty of all three before sneaking off with him…
Her disappearance hits Rice as hard as he subsequently hits the bottle, and his too-late regrets shake him to the core. Going downhill fast, the always-angry little guy throws his magnificent trumpet – which has cost him true love – off a high bridge and hops a train heading “anywhere but hereâ€â€¦
The Horn hits a boat-riding sap and thus begins to affect the lives of a succession of other poor schnooks whilst, elsewhere uptown, Betty begins to reconsider her hasty decision as the downsides of being a rich guy’s trophy – or pet – start to become apparent…
For Rice, the end of the line finds him deep in a forested nowhere-land dubbed “Kutwood†where he is befriended by the owl Bowen who is both lumberjack and radical environmental terrorist.
Slowly he is drawn into the affable agitator’s world of violence, sabotage and anti-capitalist polemic, but all he is really thinking about during so many late night conversations is the tatty old trumpet nailed high up out of reach on Bowen’s cabin wall…
And Jazz: sweet, hot Jazz music…
Back in city Betty starts to fear for life, soul and sanity on the chubby arm of her mercurial plutocrat-cat, as the portentous trumpet begins to reshape the lives of many ordinary folk innocent and venal. And then one day Betty meets an old friend of Rice’s who tells her he’s gone missing…
Sad, grim, brooding and surprisingly suspenseful, this captivating riff on complacency, ill-considered aspirations and lost chances is beguilingly constructed and subtly realised, with a smart undercurrent of bleakly cynical humour counter-pointing the Noir flavour and motif of inescapable doom.
Betty Blues will delight mature readers with a well-honed sense of the absurd and an abiding taste for the dark…
© 2003 Editions Paquet. English translation © 2013 NBM.