{"id":13521,"date":"2015-05-14T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=13521"},"modified":"2015-05-13T15:22:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T15:22:43","slug":"lulu-anew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2015\/05\/14\/lulu-anew\/","title":{"rendered":"Lulu Anew"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy \u00c3\u2030tienne Davodeau<\/strong>, translated by Joe Johnson<\/strong> (NBM\/Comics Lit)
\nISBN: 978-1-56163-972-4<\/p>\n

In 2010 Bande Dessin\u00c3\u00a9e artist, writer and designer \u00c3\u2030tienne Davodeau completed a two-volume tale he’d started in 2008. Already popular, award-winning and extremely well-regarded for his reality-based and reportage style comics work, Lulu femme nue<\/strong><\/em> was something that was special even for him. Within a year the story had been made into a much lauded and celebrated film by Solveig Anspach.<\/p>\n

Davodeau was born in 1965 and, whilst studying art at the University of Rennes, founded Psurde Studios with fellow comics creators Jean-Luc Simon and Marc \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Joub\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Le Grand. His first album – L’Homme qui aimait pas les arbres<\/em> (The Man Who Did Not Like Trees<\/em>) – was released in 1992.<\/p>\n

He followed up with a string of thoughtful, passionate and beautifully rendered books such as The Initiates<\/span><\/strong><\/a>, Les Amis de Saltiel<\/em>, Un monde si tranquille<\/em>, Anticyclone<\/em>, Les Mauvaises Gens<\/em>: une histoire de militants<\/em>.and Le Chien Qui Louches<\/em>.<\/em> Consequently he is now regarded as an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.<\/p>\n

NBM have translated and collected both volumes of the dreamily moody mystery into one stunning hardback edition and Lulu Anew<\/strong> is definitely going to be regarded as one of the very best graphic novels of the year – if not decade\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

It all starts with a sort of wake as a number of friends gather to learn the answers to a small, personal but immensely upsetting event which has blighted their lives of late.<\/p>\n

Xavier<\/em> is the first to speak and relates what they all already know. Lulu, a frumpy 40-something with three kids and a very difficult husband, has been missing for weeks. She went off for yet another distressing job interview and never came back.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t some ghastly crime or horrible abduction. Something simply happened when she was in the city and she called to say she wasn’t coming home for a while\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

The sun goes down. The attendees calmly imbibe wine and eat snacks whilst a number of her friends and family share their independently gleaned snippets of the story of Lulu’s aberration: a moment of madness where she put everything aside – just for a little while – and what happened next\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Bizarre unsettling phone calls to the raucous family home precede a quiet revolution as Lulu, without any means of support, inexplicably goes walkabout along the magnificent French Coast, living hand-to-mouth and meeting the sorts of people she never had time to notice before. Through interactions with strangers she learns about herself and at last becomes a creature of decisions and choices rather than shapeless flotsam moved by the tides of events around her\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Related with seductive grace in captivating line-&-watercolours, the gently bewitching examination of Lulu’s life, her possible futures and the tragic consequences of the mad moment when she rejects them all unfolds with uncanny, compulsive visual magnetic force.<\/p>\n

Told through and as seen by the people who think they know her, this isn’t some cosmic epic of grand events, it’s a small story writ large with every bump in the road an inescapable yet fascinating hazard. None of the so-very-human characters are one-sided or non-sympathetic – even alcoholic, often abusive husband Tanguy<\/em> has his story and is given room to show it – and Lulu’s eventual hard-earned resolution is as natural and emotionally rewarding as the seemingly incomprehensible mid-life deviation which prompted it.<\/p>\n

Slow, rapturous and addictively compelling, Lulu Anew<\/strong> is a paragon of subtlety and a glowing example of the forcefully deceptive potent power of comics storytelling.<\/p>\n

Every so often a book jumps comics’ self-imposed ghetto walls of adolescent fantasies and rampaging melodrama to make a mark on the wider world, and this elegiac petit-epic will make that sort of splash. Why not dive in now before the rush starts?
\n\u00c2\u00a9 Futuropolis 2008, 2010. \u00c2\u00a9 NBM 2015 for the English translation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By \u00c3\u2030tienne Davodeau, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM\/Comics Lit) ISBN: 978-1-56163-972-4 In 2010 Bande Dessin\u00c3\u00a9e artist, writer and designer \u00c3\u2030tienne Davodeau completed a two-volume tale he’d started in 2008. Already popular, award-winning and extremely well-regarded for his reality-based and reportage style comics work, Lulu femme nue was something that was special even for him. Within … <\/p>\n

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