Synopsis
"Amazing!"
Sammy Harkham (Editor, Kramers Ergot)
"...an enjoyable slap in the face from two of the most unique and exciting cartoonists I've come across yet."
Lilli Carré (Heads or Tails)
"Now that I can read it, I'm delighted by how evil and mean-spirited the work is."
Dash Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button, Bodyworld)
Winner of the Prix Révélation at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d Angoulême
Florent Ruppert (b. 1979) and Jérôme Mulot (b. 1981) began their creative partnership as art students in Dijon, France. Their intensely collaborative comics are drawn by both artists in a shared visual style simultaneously abstract and gestural that obscures the individual contribution of either hand. Throughout their work, Ruppert and Mulot deftly interweave the naturalistic and the synthetic, playfully manipulating productive tensions in comics, cognition and social culture. Their complex and dazzling comics pages incorporate visual devices from related media, including film and optical toys. Their cinematic figure drawing enlivens mask-like, schematic faces that alienate even as they solicit involvement. Disorienting, bracing and darkly comedic, Barrel of Monkeys prismatically examines the human bestiary at its most surreal and transgressive. It is their first book to be published in an English-language edition.
Review
Publishers Weekly review:
Imagine Funny Games with an artistic twist, compounded by inextricable graphic dissections, and you have this award-winning French import. A few of the stories (the last, in particular) in this collection veer to the acutely unpalatable, though in France the word for that is a "provocation." The two protagonists in Barrel of Monkeys are portraitists who ply their trade around S-M parties, seeing-eye dog agility competitions, and a "masquerade ball for the maimed and disfigured." In one of the tamer episodes, two peace activists kill an arms dealer as he is posing to have his portrait taken, then foil their own escape by getting into a fight with each other. The police arrive and beat them to a pulp, as the two photographers gaze on appreciatively and snap a portrait. Voyeurism in its most radical, extreme form is the basic theme of this work. But the tranquil observer who gazes on with a kind of cool objectivity is a mythical idea, and all the mayhem becomes participatory soon enough. Ruppert and Mulot's work is imaginative and extremely well put together. Full of kaleidoscopic techniques and visual trickery, the graphic novel genre doesn't get any smarter, or more evil, than this. (Jan.) --Publishers Weekly
"This pairing of cerebral form with visceral subject matter is a strange combination, as if Chris Ware combined his genetic material with that of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but it makes for an intoxicating experience." --Paste Magazine
"These are adept comics, doing what the medium can do so sharply it hurts." --Edie Fake, Quimbys
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