The Leaning Girl - Softcover

Benoit Peeters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628472278 ISBN 13: 9781628472271

Publisher: Alaxis Press, 2014

Synopsis

Nominated for two 2015 Eisner Awards: BEST U.S. EDITION OF INTERNATIONAL MATERIAL and BEST PENCILER/INKER - François Schuiten. Winners announced July 10, 2015.

After a freak accident on the Star Express roller coaster, 13 year-old Mary Von Rathen begins to lean. Doctors can not help her, so she is sent by her selfish mother and hen-pecked father to a private school in Sodrovni. Mary escapes and joins the Robertson Circus where she remains for several years, until she hears from newspaper editor, Stanislas Sainclair, that a scientist, Axel Wappendorf, might be able to help her. Wappendorf is working on a rocket to reach a planet that could hold the secret to Mary's trouble. Meanwhile an artist, Augustin Desombres, has run away from the busy world and buys an empty building on the High Plains of Aubrac in the French countryside. He begins painting murals of strange globes. Now as a young woman, Mary decides to join Wappendorf in the rocket. On the alien planet, they discover an area with many globes where she has a chance meeting with the artist.

Winner of the coveted Gaiman Award as the No. 1 translated foreign comic book series published in Japan in 2013, this story of perseverance and a young girl s search for love has been translated from it's original French into ten languages. Author and publisher Stephen D. Smith has now translated The Leaning Girl into English. It features an introduction by Karen Green, Graphic Novel Librarian at Columbia University.

The hefty book measures 9.25" x 11.625" and .75" thick. Printed on beautiful art papers and cased in a softcover binding with reinforced flaps, the quality of the book itself is only outweighed by the material inside.

About this title

About the Author:

François Schuiten was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1956. His father was a prominent architect who had a tremendous impact on his architecturally-inspired stories. Schuiten s first comic work was published in the French magazine, Pilote, when he was only seventeen. Four years later, he bagan being published in the experimental magazine, Métal Hurlant and later in it s American spin-off, Heavy Metal. His love of architecture became apparent in this series, The Obscure Cities, an evocation of fantastic, partly imaginary cities that he created with his childhood friend Benoît Peeters beginning in 1983 for the Belgian monthly comics magazine, À Suivre. Every story focuses on one city or building, and further explores a world where architects, urbanists, and ultimately urbatects , are the leading powers and architecture is the driving force behind society. Always at the forefront of technological advances, his 2012 book, La Douce, featured interactive augmented reality. He has also worked as a production designer for a several films including The Perils of Gwendoline, Taxandria, The Golden Compass and most recently, Mars et Avril by Martin Villeneuve.

Benoît Peeters was born in Paris in 1956. After a degree in Philosophy at the Sorbonne, he prepared his Master s under the direction of Roland Barthes. His first novel, Omnibus, was published in 1976, followed by his second, La Bibliothèque de Villers, in 1980. Since then, he has published over sixty works on a wide variety of subjects. An expert on Hergé, he authored Tintin and the World of Hergé and Hergé Son of Tintin. A long association with his friend, François Schuiten, has lead to this series of graphic novels, The Obscure Cities. Sixteen volumes have appeared so far, with great success; winning numerous awards and being translated into more than ten languages. Peeters has also collaborated with the graphic artist Frédéric Boilet, the photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, the musician Bruno Letort and the filmmakers Raoul Ruiz and Jaco Van Dormael. He is the author of three short films as well as several documentaries. He directed one feature film The Last Shot. In 2012, his biography of deconstructivist philosopher, Jacques Derrida, was published. The book has been translated into English (Polity Press) and six other languages.

Review:

The Leaning Girl Before dark energy and string theory entered the popular lexicon, the Belgian graphic novel wunderkind team of Schuiten and Peeters imagined how invisible cosmological forces might exercise their perplexing pull on a few select mortals in this fabulously original and haunting story, translated from the French. Mary Von Rathen, a charming sprite who drives her mother crazy with her boundless energy and insatiable imagination, embarks on the Star Express, an amusement park attraction that leaves her leaning at a constant diagonal unable to stand up straight. Somehow, this incredible premise leads to a perfectly logical denouement involving competing dimensional realities and invisible planets with powerful gravitational fields. In a subplot, after being lambasted by the ranking art critics of the day, painter Augustin Desombres seeks refuge in an abandoned manor house on a desolate plane. The paths of Mary and Augustin finally cross in a creative and sexual conflagration of quantum proportions. The sixth in the ongoing, futuristic Obscure Cities series, The Leaning Girl offers superbly intricate artwork, and the writing has a literary scope that extends well beyond science fiction and flirts with greatness. - Calvin Reid --Publishers Weekly

Favorite Books of 2014

Once again I feel like a character from Philip K. Dick s Now Wait for Last Year. Did someone slip JJ-180 into my buttermilk? At least I know that in this particular time-stream, I m supposed to be listing my Favorite Books of 2014.

This is one of my favorite graphic novels (or whatever you want to call them) from the last decade. It is connected in my mind both with Glimmerglass and with Station Eleven (see below). In a note to readers of this English translation, Benoit Peeters writes that it may be precisely because The Obscure Cities the Schuiten-Peeters series in which this volume belongs is fundamentally so full of holes and destined to remain incomplete that it invites so much outside participation from our readers. I can attest to that, since I came to this installment without any context and was drawn deeply into it. - John Wilson --Christianity Today - Books & Culture

In a steampunk-influenced counter-earth, young Mary von Rathen suddenly stands off-kilter as if pulled by a different gravity. Professor Wappendorf readies an interplanetary rocket to investigate planet-threatening dangers, while an isolationist painter on Earth (depicted in photos) seeks his mysterious muse. All three meet in a Jules Verne-type center of the counter-Earth (Verne himself plays a bit part), and the mysteries are resolved. Schuiten's haunting inked linesimpersonate Victorian engravings and counterpoint Plissart's misty photos to give a beautiful nearly real quality. The counter-Earth locales are fully embodied with visual magic, including Mary's sometimes delicately sexual adventures. Yet even if it might seem to follow from the setup, the sad conclusion that life's responsibilities trump art, imagination, and love seems denied by the artfulness of the work itself.

VERDICT: Bemusement for the eyes and mind, this sets a high mark for sublime art and imaginative plotting, even if one debates the resolution....It's a solid bet for lovers of philosophical, alt-world fiction. - Martha Cornog --Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Alaxis Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1628472278
• ISBN 13: 9781628472271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Stephen D. Smith
• Illustrator: François Schuiten