Edmond Baudoin: An Appreciation
In the last issue of Weirdo (#28:Verre d'eau), there was an intriguing four-page story about a brief, flirtatious conversation between a French man and an American woman. The brushwork is loose and kinetic without looking sloppy. The backgrounds are sketchy, yet they perfectly evoke the atmosphere of the Parisian sidewalk café where the encounter takes place. As the pair talks, thoughts and impressions sprout from their heads: while the man carries on about Marylin Monroe and Woody Allen, the woman watches as a KKK rally literally blossoms out of the top of his head. The mood is light and humorous, yet their is an undertone of gravity: the cultural weight we all carry, and also the sexual tension which ultimately guides so many of our actions. The artist who wrote this untitled comic is named Edmond Baudoin, and as far as I know it is the only piece of his to have been published in North America, with the exception of a slight, 2-page comic in a recent anthology of comics (ironically enough) originally published by Kodansha in Japan.*
Baudoin's sensuous line is immediately arresting, standing in conrast to the tendency of most cartoonists, especially in the francophone tradition, to work towards cleanliness and stylization. Baudoin's books are drawn most often in brush, but occasionally in pen, and he is also daring in his incorporation of collage elements: bits of text, sketchbook fragments, even excerpts of other peoples' artwork. He is a master of contrast, and is adept at using sparse linework and large white areas to suggest rich, colorful spaces. While Baudoin's visual style is striking and accomplished, he also demonstrates a deep appreciation of comics storytelling, making him one of the most exciting and challenging artists to come out of France in recent years.
Many of Baudoin's stories deal with his modest lower middle-class childhood in Nice, a resort town in southern France. His relationship to this town and its surrounding landscape --particularly the beach and ocean, his interactions with his family, and the dawning of sexuality form the interrelated centerpieces of his both his autobiographical and his fictional oeuvre. However, Baudoin is not content to simply rehash stories of teen angst through a mist of nostalgia. Throughout his work there is a constant reappraisal and questioning, both of himself and his work. As much as he is interested in telling stories from his life, he is just as interested in exploring the impulse to tell those stories, as well as the difficulties inherent in trying to extricate some sort of truth from out of the morass of memory, subjective bias, and self-censorship.
In Made in US (L'Association, 1995), a recent mini-comic which has made its way across the Atlantic, Baudoin laments the impossibility of making sense of his grandfather's life story. What little he knows of this man who supposedly came to the US in the 1860's and befriended Buffalo Bill, he remembers mainly from the bedtime stories told to him by his own long-dead father. In one section of Éloge de la Poussière (L'Association, 1995), Baudoin dissects and re-tells a story from one of his earliest books, Passe le Temps (Futuropolis, 1982). Pasting in panels from that earlier comic along with new drawings, Baudoin analyses his own "deliberate betrayal of memory and, thus, history", and re-establishes a truth that was "too difficult to express" at that time.
Edmond Baudoin is long overdue for recognition in the English-speaking comics world. He has been publishing work for about 15 years, and I have managed to get my hands on just 5 of his 20+ books. What I do have is pretty evenly spread across his career thus far, and it suggests an artist that is constantly refining his technique, while obsessively mining his own history to form an ongoing self-portrait of unusual complexity.
by Matt Madden (1998)