Beyond Borders: Portrait Of The Artist As An Ageing Man

Those who know their bande desinée know their Lewis Trondheim. One of France's foremost cartooning talents, he's tempers laughter with an eye for cruel honesty, as shown in his autobiographical work APPROXIMATIVEMENT.
20 October 2003

"Where the hell am I going? What have I done with my life?"

If you're approaching your thirties, or you're already thirtysomething or beyond, then you've probably asked yourself these questions many times by now. This crisis of purpose is quite real, at a time when you start wondering where you've been and where you're heading; when you realize you're not so young anymore, that you're getting older all the time, and that you're not getting any wiser along the way. Perhaps you've got kids, bills, pets, a house, a spouse, a mortgage, a pit dweller as your boss; your hair is turning grey, your once flat belly is now a fat blob, and the creases on your face no longer disappear when you stop smiling. Lovely isn't it? Of course, there are advantages to growing older, but when you're counting the number of hairs that go down the bathroom sink every day, it's quite hard to remember what they are.

So here comes Lewis Trondheim, and the bastard makes a comic about it. An autobiographical comic, so you can feel the pain more. And it's marvellous stuff, so you can't avoid reading it. The big, mean, French bastard...

Lewis Trondheim launched his career at the end of the 80s. He started out, as did so many others, by publishing a fanzine, and basically learned to draw as he went along. That is to say, he really didn't know how to draw when he started publishing - and some may argue that he still doesn't.

The French market at the time was in turmoil, with the big companies still selling loads, but with a growing number of smaller imprints spawning from everywhere, filling the gaps of the market not yet reached by the big boys. One of those new companies was L'Association, founded by Menu, Stanislas, Killofer, David B and Trondheim to publish their own and other creators' works.

As well as being a prolific creator for L'Association, Trondheim kept publishing projects through other companies as well; he published around fifty-odd albums in just six years. His most famous works are DONJON, a three hundred album epic set in three different time periods, set up with Johann Sfar and a dream time of bande desinée artists such as Blaine and Andreas; and LAPINOT, where he experiments with genres and settings while working with a consistent cast of characters and tone.

Trondheim is now a well-established name in the French industry. Possessed of an extremely fertile imagination, he writes, plots and draws dozens of short strips, while regularly writing the series LE ROI CATÁSTROPHE, LITTLE NOEL and VENEZIA series, as well as DONJON and LAPINOT. He's one of the few creators to have achieved success while remaining true to his roots. Those roots are best explored through the series ABSOLUTE CONTINUUM COMICS, published through Cornelius and later re-released as the single volume APPROXIMATIVEMENT.

APPROXIMATIVEMENT is an autobiographical comic. Sort of. The main character is Trondheim himself, who, along with the rest of the cast - his girlfriend and his studio co-workers at L'Association - is pictured as an animal. (Trondheim almost never draws any real people.)

You might imagine that it's not the easiest cast of characters to identify with, but you'd be wrong. Trondheim lays himself bare before the reader. That's not to say that this is one of those comics where the author attempts to embarrass himself and the readers by describing his first masturbatory experiences. Rather, this is a creator showing us how he really is; his fears, his failures, and how he really feels about his life. Of course, there's some comedy, and it's frequently hilarious, but as in much of the rest of Trondheim's works, it has a bitter aftertaste. Anybody who has read DONJON will be familiar with the sensation. Trondheim can give you sixty pages of comedy, then sour the ending in a way that shocks the reader and leads him to re-read the comic in a new light. It's not all about the laughs.

Such sentiments are even more prominent in APPROXIMATIVEMENT. What basically starts as a diary of Trondheim's interaction with his peers at L'Association ends as an intimate view of a young professional's encroaching mid-life crisis. You can actually feel his fears crawling from the paper and working their way into your thoughts; the sudden realisation that you're not young any more, that you are in the crossroads of the rest of your life, and there's no turning back. Throw in a little creative angst about art and morality, and the reader is in for a fairly depressing sounding lecture.

Thank God Trondheim is one of best comedians in the business, and he manages to keep the reader laughing throughout. And those are some loud laughs. It's quite difficult not to chuckle at Trondheim's retelling of his meeting with Moebius, or the toilet-brush fencing episode.

And that's where the joys of the book lie. Despite its bitterness, it never fails to entertain and amuse, thanks to a combination of genuine wit and an immediately pleasing cartoon art style. Expressive and detailed despite its amateurish look, it mixes the Disney heritage of Rosa and Barks with the clear line of the French-Belgian school, making it both attractive and perfectly suited for Trondheim's story.

Here's the best news. When it comes to the works of Lewis Trondheim, English-language readers have it easy. Both Fantagraphics and NBM had been working to introduce Trondheim's canon to the English-speaking market. NBM publishes DONJON, and some volumes of LAPINOT (under the name of McCluskey) in black and white comic book format, while Fantagraphics edits a black and white anthology called THE NIMROD, recently nominated for one Harvey and two Eisner Awards. Fantagraphics has also been publishing such diverse Trondheim works as issues of GENESIS APOCALYPTIQUES and APPROXIMATIVEMENT.

As yet, there is no English-language collected edition of APPROXIMATIVEMENT. Hopefully that will come in due course, so we can all have the opportunity to laugh as we grow old together.

Marcos Castrillón is a translator and interpreter, and a freelance writer for the Spanish magazine NEMO.

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