Are comics not serious? But they are related to the comic only in English. In French, for example, they say bande dessinee: «drawn ribbon.» And there is a precedent in our culture.
Are comics not serious? But they are related to the comic only in English. In French, for example, they say bande dessinee: «drawn ribbon.» And in our culture there is a precedent: absolutely not funny and not childish «comics» — the famous autobiography of Evfrosinya Kersnovskaya «How much a man is worth», memories of years of imprisonment in the Gulag. So the project of the new St. Petersburg publishing house «Bumkniga» is bold, but not reckless: the Russian reader is prepared for such a cultural phenomenon as the graphic novel. David B. tells how his older brother developed epilepsy at the age of seven. The disease has changed the life of the whole family: «She sleeps in my brother, and when she wakes up, she pounces on all of us.» The little boy is trying to figure out where evil comes from. With desperate childish honesty, he peers at the monsters that his fantasy gives birth to, and at the horrors created by people. He asks the elders about the history of the family. Wars — in Algeria, in Indochina, Europe — pass before his eyes. Together with him we will see dirt and ugliness. And heroism is not so much in the fight against the enemy, but in the passionate will to preserve the human in oneself. “Why are you talking about your ancestors? This has nothing to do with your brother’s illness, ”his mother remarks to the hero. And he says, “No, it’s important. They fought all the time to get out of poverty. And you fought in exactly the same way to cure Jean-Christophe.» The translator Olga Kustova performed a complex and delicate task: she allowed the hero to speak Russian in the yard, colloquial, children’s language in such a way that he did not cease to be literature.
BOOKBOOK, 384 p.