By Anouk Ricard, translated by Helge Dascher (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-138-3 (PB)
Here’s another superb example of sophisticated yet simple Euro-cartooning designed to charm and challenge in equal amounts.
Couched in terms of British television, this beautifully bonkers anthropomorphic 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. However, 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 is vast, ranging 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 aet Froga series (Capsule Comique, 2004) and Galaxy Darling (2009, with Hugo Piette in Le Journal de Spirou) being 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 of modern day office practice and politics. In 2014, GQ France magazine named her one of the 25 most humorous women in France.
The disturbing and hilarious lampoon delivered here is a calculatedly naïve, faux juvenile soap operatic melodrama. It’s one of her few translated works thus far, but one of the best……
Benson’s Cuckoos produces and distributes those bird-themed clocks loved and loathed in equal amounts by holidaymakers everywhere, and our cautionary tale begins when highly strung Richard (he’s the blue duck on the cover) attends 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 quite 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, Richard 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 endless hours pass. Almost everybody is terse and self-absorbed when not outright hostile, and Benson roams around wearing strange hats; alternately threatening to fire everybody and over-sharing uncomfortable personal observations.
Tuesday, 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, the new guy 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 highlighting 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…
A film crew turns up at work the next day 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.