This is an album that is best enjoyed like a beautiful piece of butcher. A comic book full of sap, medium rare of course, packed full of talent and humor, and that happens to a point… named. Alexis Chabert, aka Kolonel Chabert, is the author. The cartoonist veteran of the 9th art, which is illustrated first by Delcourt with the saga of heroic fantasy Rogon le Leu (on a script by Didier Convard), before they make a specialty of biographies of celebrities (Gainsbourg, Louis de Funès, or Sacha Guitry) has signed its debut as a full author.

“The idea for this comic was born in a bar in the Batignolles area in the face of a butcher,” says the person. We were four, a friend, a clown and a butcher named David. After a few drinks, David told us about the harsh reality of an apprentice butcher, all the while singing drunken songs of Normandy. The clown then told me: “You should do a comic!” I said to myself: “But yes, of course!” However, the idea has made its way gradually in my brain.”

a Few years later, a beautiful spring morning, at the terrace of a cafe on the place Clichy, the same Kolonel Chabert has an appointment with his publisher. He agreed to “sell” an album project on the autobiography of the singer Renaud. The editor begs. Chabert went on with other projects. Among these reemerged suddenly the idea of telling the life of a butcher… “Ha! It, it interests me!” interrupts the editor.

destiny was fantastic and burlesque

Chabert recovery the story of the odyssey sausage in her heart. He works in a first time with scriptwriter Rodolphe. Then, he took alone the responsibility of the scenario and the drawing of this album is atypical, nugget, mixing with subtlety, drama and humour, around the universe of the beef. A universe barely touched on in a general way, and that BD is often limited by the famous bubble of the albums of Tintin signed Hergé : “Hello? The beef acme corporation?”

Hector the butcher tale of the fate fantastic and burlesque of this young kid, son of a butcher normand, whose life was to be like a quiet river, all mapped out… but that is to be found embedded in the tourbillon tragic existence to say the least, shaken up.

Hector the butcher has the great merit to capture a character, and taking him from childhood to adulthood, in a large wind-fiction. Finally, between The Butcher by Claude Chabrol, with Jean Yanne (1970), and Delicatessen of Jeunet and Caro Jean-Claude Dreyfus (1991), the space of creation was great. Kolonel Chabert does not lie to her illustrious elder, which inspired his nickname, the great Honoré de Balzac.

the album plunges into the depths of “the human comedy”, and the fate of his hero, Hector, that kid who dreamed of opening a butcher shop, an exciting tale of learning, to a thousand and one adventures.

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THE BOX BD:

I have played on the ambiguity and double meanings , plays Chabert. Because there is sensuality in the pieces of meat in a butcher butcher. The libido is never far away. This big beef not very reassured that dominates the board is to be lived as an animal revered. Almost the golden calf. The two nuns contemplating a picture which is of the order of the sacred… ” editions Jungle

In this page 59, which contains a single checkbox, Kolonel Chabert takes the time to slow down his story. He plants his set. It puts in scene its young butcher who begins to master his technique. In front of him, two nuns who come to buy meat in the dispensary of his boss.

“I wanted to show that my small butcher became a professional,” notes the designer. The idea of this sequence lies in a play on words: two good sisters who go to the butcher’s to buy a slice of faith. After, what I’ve drawn changed quite a bit, especially when I decided to put in scene the giant map of the beef with all its parts labeled. My hero turns into a little tourist guide! It offers a trip to these two customers…”

voyage

This invitation to travel is going through a text bubble which plays cleverly on the double meaning of the terms used. “One attack by a big end chest, you turn in the direction of the low-lying coasts, you join the strips baronesses via the flank thin flank. And we meet at the cottage at the nuts through the tail.” “I played on the ambiguity and double meanings, plays Chabert. Because there is sensuality in the pieces of meat in a butcher-pork butcher. The libido is never far away. This big beef not very reassured that dominates the board is to be lived as an animal revered. Almost the golden calf. The two nuns contemplating a picture which is of the order of the sacred…”

on the face of the hero, he is smiling ; Hector stands out as a chic type. “I had a lot of trouble with this character, says the author of Bourbon Street . I wanted to put in scene a character the opposite of the Romantic image of the butcher big, powerful, thick and muscular. On the contrary, Hector is rather large, slender. He has the eye that sparkles and seems a little smoother, without doubt, to facilitate identification with the reader, a bit like what made Hergé with the face of Tintin. The face of Hector, it is a head of peanut with a prominent nose. It’s a boy tying, which has preserved a part of the childhood, and which is inhabited by a dream.”

“As to his name, finds Chabert, it is very simple, I wanted something that hits. Hector, it is a bit dry, it looks like rumors of a butcher. And it has a small side retro…”

Hector the butcher, Kolonel Chabert, 125 p., editions Jungle. 16.95 in€.