Haunted - Hardcover

Dupuy, Philippe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1897299265 ISBN 13: 9781897299265

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008

Synopsis

A surprising, wry, and deeply moving reflection on despair and the way back out

Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later―the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time―Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent,
spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt―the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy's acid humor and lyrical sensibility.

A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the watering hole imagined as the anthropomorphic "Forest Friends." Heart pumping, gaze turned inward, the ground occasionally giving way beneath his feet, this alter ego concludes that sometimes you need to cross the line to figure out where it is.

The original French edition of Haunted was nominated for the 2006 award for Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Paris, Philippe Dupuy has been working in comics for nearly thirty years, mostly in collaboration with Charles Berberian, creating strips about their well-known character Mr. Jean.

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for the Mr. Jean series that he collaborates on with Charles Berberian, Dupuy strikes out on his own in a graphic novel first published in French in 2006. Looking more like the sketches for a novel than the novel itself, Dupuy's loosely imagined fantasy is structured around an episodic series of Run Movies wherein the runner has incidental encounters and thoughts. Interspersed with these episodes are recollections of dreams, presumably from the runner's unconscious, of uncommon darkness (usually of the violently sexual mythological variety). Eventually the two series begin to merge, as in Run Movie #3, wherein the runner falls into an empty museum and is informed by a barking dog that oddly enough, bare spaces sometimes invite the most curiosity. Dupuy's loose sketches evoke the occasional shiver of discomfort, but sometimes he brings the dark dream world into sharp focus. In one story, the runner encounters an erudite duck living in a fantastically large house, after which the two have a conversation that begins in the ridiculous but ultimately edges into the sublime. While Dupuy's artwork and sometimes cruel-seeming viewpoint toward his characters repel at first, eventually the book becomes like a dream itself, next to impossible to resist. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1897299265
• ISBN 13: 9781897299265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208