Les lectures de Farzad

Catégorie : Readings

My readings of Books and Comics, reviews and comments.

  • « Paul à Québec » by Michel Rabagliati

    🇫🇷 Simonac ! Tu veux-tu améliorer ton vocabulaire québécois tout en lisant une histoire émouvante ? Alors lis donc « Paul à Québec ».

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    Note: I really don’t know if this comic book has been translated to English or even if it’d be as fun to read, because it’s full of typically French Canadian expressions and slang.

    This comic book is part of a series written by an award-winning author from the Québec province of Canada. It was given to me by a Canadian friend. Another Canadian friend told me this morning she has read the whole series!

    The story begins for me as a nice manual to learn how to speak « Québecois »
    (I even find myself taking the Quebec accent in my head by reading the expressions sometimes incomprehensible 🙂 ), while discovering the in-laws of the hero, without real history: the first part is quite contemplative.

    Then, the story switches with a dramatic event and becomes very touching until the end. It’s an intimate story, in the heart of a family in Quebec City, we are first in the Now, a great family celebration, at the home of the narrator’s father-in-law, who we discover little by little that he is the central figure of the story, which was initially centered on the narrator. The narrator himself, Paul, an illustrator, is inspired by the life of the author of the comic book series. Then the story focuses on the father-in-law, and we dive into his childhood, his emancipation, his active life, his personal and professional achievements.

    I won’t say any more about the dramatic turning point in the story so as not to spoil anything, just know that I couldn’t let go of the comic once I got there and had to finish everything before I could to go to bed, satisfied, but my throat a little tied up…

    I am super happy that my friend from Quebec gave me this book, and I think I will read all the others. I even discovered in passing that this comic book has given birth to a movie!

  • Métal Hurlant: Complete collection!

    Métal Hurlant: Complete collection!

    I have finally realized a teenager’s dream, whose origin goes back to the release of the Canadian film « Heavy Metal », produced by Ivan Reitman and released in 1981 😍. This animated film, which had strongly marked me at the time, made me discover the French magazine Métal Hurlant. I already talked a bit about this magazine in another article.

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    I was too young to read it at the time (11 years old) and was therefore only 5 years old when the first issue came out in 1975. My father-in-law had just bought a copy when the film came out, a copy that disappeared a long time ago, I don’t know where…

    Since then, I discovered and appreciated in comics, and also in movies, the mythical authors such as Moebius, Druillet, Caza, Gotlib… Time passed and, in 2019, on a whim, I told myself that I was going to buy the whole collection!

    I started buying the first issues on eBay in October 2019, then Rakuten and also some copies on Le Bon Coin. After almost a year and a half of research, I found and bought at the end of February 2021 the only issue I was missing, the #145, the second last issue of poor quality but very rare.

    I took with pride this family photo which regroups the 132 issues published from 1975 to 1987, the 12 issues in US Comics format from 2002 to 2004, the final issue 146 of 2006, plus 22 special issues. However, I am missing the supplements (postcard, disc, 3D glasses…) that a few rare and wise collectors, including some of you, may have kept 😉.

    Fun fact: I shared this picture with a similar message on the Facebook group « Fan de Métal Hurlant » and Jean-Pierre Dionnet himself, the co-creator of the magazine, liked and shared my photo 😍 I also got a like from Jean-Christophe Menu, the creator of the comic book publisher L’Association 😎 It’s almost as good as an autograph for me, ha ha!

  • “A People’s History of American Empire“ by Howard Zin, Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle

    I finished this comic book after 2 days of reading it and it’s a shock! 🤯 It’s a realistic painting of the dark side of the USA, the one we hear little or nothing about for some of the stories gathered here.

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    The author of the book that was used as a reference is a pacifist, this can be felt in the choice of the events told, but that does not take anything away from their strength and scope. I am both horrified and happy to have read this comic book.

    There are stories that I already knew, those about the dictatorships in South America, and all the chaos introduced in Iran (I am of Iranian origin) but what is disgusting is that the US has been committing these atrocities continuously for 200 years, while at the same time working in parallel to their influence in the literary, artistic, scientific, etc. fields. These are not just a few dark historical « accidents ». The two sides of the US are intimately intertwined, inseparable: the money of one finances the other.

    For example, characters that we see in a rather positive (Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Carter…) or just mixed (the banker J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller family…) light appear here as monsters! Racists, liars, bloodthirsty, greedy, accomplices or sponsors of crimes.

    Be careful however not to interpret this comics only in the context of
    emotion! I think that’s what I will keep above all: not everything is all black and white, one must not hate the USA after reading this comic book (or the book that served as a model) but we have to stop idealizing this country.

    I think we must take a step back, not seek revenge, not do worse, not trigger an opposite pendulum movement: oppression, revolt or a « benevolent » counter-attack do not cancel out the oppressions of the past, they would only lead us towards an even worse, even totalitarian system.

    Fortunately, the comic ends on a hopeful note. Moreover, shortly after I read this book, Donald Trump was not re-elected at the end of 2020, all is not so bad in the USA

  • Batman: “A Long Halloween” & “Dark Victory”

    Updated in April 2021 with “Dark Victory”.

    A Long Halloween

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    Batman: A long Halloween by Jeph Loeb & Time Sale was recommended to me by Batman fans in the Bubble Family & Friends Facebook group, a forum used by users of the excellent Bubble application that I use to manage my BD/Comics/Manga collection.

    Note: This book is a fantastic American comics, I will therefore write this critics in English although I read it in French 🙂

    I’m not really a super-hero fan so, for me, finding in which order comic books should be read and moreover which ones deserve to be read, is a perilous task! There are so many parallel stories, reboots, crossovers… If you’re like me, a Batman fan but not a comics’ nerd, you should first read Batman: Year One by Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli, a reboot of Batman’s « birth », it’s really excellent! And then you should read « A long Halloween ».

    A long Halloween is a very thick book, 400 pages for the French edition! I was first intimidated and did not like Bruce Wayne’s drawing in the first pages, I thought I was going to waste my time… but after a few pages I could not put the book down anymore! I finished it in two evenings and loved it.

    The plot is very dense, there are many surprises, and many villains, Batman’s recurring enemies, appear in the story, including the well known Catwoman and Joker. The story is about a trio’s struggle (Batman the super-hero, James Gordon the honest cop and Harvey Dent the tough District Attorney) to get rid of the 2 families who control Gotham City (Maroni and Falcone’s mafia) all the while solving a series of mysterious crimes, all committed on celebration days (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day…).

    The search for the criminal, named Holiday, will be very long, full of murders, plot twists, villains and darkness.

    I won’t go into detail (and please be careful as the Wikipedia links I shared above contain spoilers!), but I really loved this book and recommend it!

    Dark Victory

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    Five months after this comic, I read its sequel in April 2021,
    “Dark Victory”. It is as dark and breathtaking as the first one!

    Of course, the mechanics of the scenario is the same and this is the only reproach I would make to this sequel: the scenario hides us some key information by revealing only silhouettes or unidentifiable voices of characters who remain in the shadow. And it’s only at the end of the comic book that we say to ourselves « oh yes, I understand now! ».

    Apart from this repetition, this volume is excellent, and the character of Batman is as ambiguous as ever. As the title says, the victory of “Good” is always bitter.

    It is in this volume that the authors introduce the first Robin, aka Dick Grayson. As in all the recent DC Comics, I find that the reinvention is always very good, the genesis of these characters is less caricatured than in the historical comics.

    I also warmly recommend this second volume, but don’t read it if you are in a dark mood!

  • « Le Lambeau » by Philippe Lançon

    « Le Lambeau » by Philippe Lançon

    Here is an autobiographical book, in a style very different from what I usually read, darker but with a remarkable writing. Once I started it I hardly let go of it. It is  » Le Lambeau  » by Philippe Lançon. Lançon is a journalist at Libération and a columnist for Charlie Hebdo. He was in the newsroom on January 7, 2015 and is one of the rare survivors… He was shot twice in the hands or arms and especially one bullet in the face which tore off part of his face (jaw, lower lip…). Lançon wrote this book 3 years later, reconstructing his life from his memory, memories of his loved ones, emails, messages, everything that happened since the day before the attack.

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    Many pages are devoted to his convalescence, to the reconstitution of his face, from a bone and flesh from his leg (hence the title in French). The reading of these passages can be difficult, but it is extraordinarily well written, very intelligent, with backtracking, introspections, digressions on music, the arts, where we see that Lançon is a fine observer of the world around him. He knew how to make addictive the reading of a book that could have been simply descriptive or otherwise uneasy.

    This book touches me enormously because Charlie Hebdo’s attack is one of the events that has traumatized me the most in recent years. I saw several of my idols disappear, Cabu of course whose comics and cartoons cradled my childhood, his appearances on television in a children’s show… Charb… and especially the atypical economist Bernard Maris whom I listened to on France Inter and whose two-volume book I had read (Antimanuel d’économie)… Maris was lying in front of Lançon, Brains exploded by a Kalashnikov bullet… Incredible and sad thing, the book ends on the day of November 13, 2015: Philippe Lançon is in New York and he learns of the attack on the Bataclan.

    Three days after the end of my reading it was precisely the 4th anniversary of this attack. It’s a coincidence but it makes the reading of this book even more striking. I highly recommend it, even if the subject may seem sinister, it is incredibly well written! The 500 pages are well worth it.