The Wonderful World Of French Comics: Monkey Bizness

Image taken from Mademoizelle.com

Today I decided to start a new on-going series on this blog called 'The Wonderful World Of French Comics'.

In France comics are usually called 'Bande Dessinée' or by its abbreviation BD, spelled as bédé, which is the equivalent of the term Graphic Novels. If you happen to travel around France and get to visit different comic book shops in different towns, you will find that each shop in each city will have a slightly different line-up of BD. Most owners turn out to be real connaisseurs with their own taste deeply embedded in comic book culture. Just as diverse as the assortment are the readers who will hang out there and chat about the latest BD gossip. There seems to be a genre, a story and graphical style for everyone, making a visit to a Bedetheque in France a uniquely pleasant experience.

The BD I would like to introduce you to is called Monkey Bizness which is written and drawn by Rémi Zaarour aka Pozla, written by Boris Dolivet aka ELDiablo and colored by Pozla's wife Miaw. Three volumes have been published so far and they have proven to be so successful that a TV series is already in production:

The series is about a sleek baboon and a tough gorilla called Jack Mandrill and Hammerfist who are living in a post-apocalyptic city known as Los Animales in 2425,  a place that is divided into different districts according to species and ruled by violent gangs in a world that has turned upside down: due to biological experiments the animals have become intelligent and taken the place of the humans who are now without language and serve only as food or slaves for the animals.
A military experiment gone wrong, initiated by the same people who are responsible for the apocalyptic turn of events, brings an astronaut with a serious pathological oedipal complex into this future, letting loose a ripple of events that only brings more mayhem into an already anarchistic world.

Image taken from Li-An's Blog.

A word of warning: the series is pretty much politically incorrect in many ways and there is a lot of violence, nudity and drugs involved. Call it an Aristotelian Katharsis, but it's a lot fun to accompany two monkeys doing whatever they want in a no-holds barred city of wild animals.

Pozla's style in ink is very rough and gritty, which lends perfectly to the fast-paced and dark humored action of the comic. The duo is know for their work with ElDiablo as director and Pozla as co-director on Lascars a very successful online series of animation shorts about the street culture of youngsters in Paris that even was turned into real life tv series afterwards (I will certainly make a blog post about this other series in the future). It seems as if all their experience is going to turn into another tv series with this one as well, as production is well under-way and a teaser trailer as already been put online:

MONKEY BIZNESS TEASER from Passion Paris on Vimeo.

Unfortunately the BD series has not yet been translated. Another good reason to learn some French aside from that Paris trip and the language here really isn't all that compliacted: you will learn a good deal of slang and cursing and aren't those always the most important things to know? ;)

A good place to shop for French comics in general is Amazon.fr to which you should be able to log into with your regular account and which should deliver worldwide. There is a well stocked comic book store in almost every town in France and I can only recommend that you seek one out if you happen to travel there: it's always worthwhile. 

If you have any questions about French comics, if you want to know where to get them or want some recommendations about new publications, please do not hesitate to ask me in the comments!