What I Got on my Summer Holidays - Part 4 - Blutch - MITCHUM

This is a very interesting book. It’s mainly wordless so I could read it all, but it is still hard to understand. The first two chapters (they were all printed separately at first as Mitchum 1 – 5 and then collected here) are about artists and their muses. Then Mitchum 3 actually has Robert Mitchum in it, and an evil malevolent Jimmy Stewart too in a weird little story about a police woman trying to save an unconscious woman from monstrous Hollywood stars. Mitchum 4 has a kind of trashy all female western in the background with beautiful inky drawings of ballet dancers superimposed over the top. Mitchum 5 is a story apparently by the Brothers Grimm (I had never heard it before) starring a bear in some tribulations. Then there is a bonus section at the back with Man Friday and a female explorer (I think?) on on a desert island.

All the drawings are lovely, they are really inky and all done in brush strokes. I have heard of Blutch before a couple of times, in an interview with Craig Thompson in the Comics Journal, and in the Maybe Later book below cos he shares a studio with Dupuy. They are very French looking, a bit like Baudoin’s stuff too. There are a lot of trashy Hollywood / girl fights motifs in the stories as well as some fine art stuff.

What I Got on my Summer Holidays - Part 2 - Dupuy & Berberian - MAYBE LATER

This was a very good book, I got it in English from the fancy shop in Brussels (I'll post about it later) and read it several times on the holiday. Its a journal by Dupuy & Berberian, the two man comics team who write the M. Jean stories in France. It tells of all the troubles and problems they had while writing the 3rd M Jean book. It's very clever and funny too, and the drawing is great. They tell how they have to deal with all the people who don't understand them writing comics for a living, thinking they are 'just joking around'. Berberian in particular had a very difficult year before he wrote the book and tells about it very well. I never fancied the M Jean books much before but now I have read this, and a couple of their travel sketchbooks too (more later) I'm going to give the one thats come out in English a try. This book is published by D&Q and L'Association. It's quite inspiring to anyone who is trying to make comic books and having a hard time...

What I Got on my Summer Holidays - Part 1 - Nicolas de Crecy - ESCALES

Wow this is stunning. Its a sketchbook by Nicolas de Crecy on the subject of transport. It has lovely drawings of cars, trains, ships and people travelling. I've not got much to say on it except its beautiful and he shows a massive range of different types of drawing with loads of different materials used in the pictures... Its from the publisher Cornelius.