Schrauwen has a habit of introducing very simple, basic images, explained thoroughly, only to deploy them later in less obvious contexts. Yet the donkey later recurs as a freestanding image of lust, without introduction, as does an ostrich, which represents the looming threat of insanity in this very perceptual work, filled with madmen and the madness of colonialism itself.Īll of this is to note that O. This often includes metaphors: when Arsène is described as having “an erection that would flatter a randy donkey,” he is drawn, indeed, as a humanoid donkey with an erect penis. One might deem it all unsophisticated, as what follows violates a longstanding ‘rule’ of comics: constantly, the artist describes something in narrative captions at the top of a panel and then draws what he has already described below.

Schrauwen introducing himself to you, face-to-face, because this is his story-lines on paper, drawings of his creation. This is a book of imagination and tale-telling. Schrauwen confesses to this immediately: he has turned his grandfather into a cartoon, ARSÈNE, ensconced him in a gem (the suggestion of Congolese diamonds is unavoidable), and set him adrift, on that cover, in a sea of melting patterns, coursing with spermatozoa, amoebae, and primordial grids and shapes as if they have been dug assiduously from the wet earth of comics. Schrauwen’s genuine grandfather, but the details of his years spent living in the Belgian Congo of the late 1940s, as described in this book, are admittedly sheer fantasy. I risk offense, of course, in deeming this lineage ‘notional’-A. Cloistered in small diamonds, you find tiny pictures-icons-labeled by what they represent in the story: foaming trappist beer for FREEDOM a curious cartoon worm for FEAR a key entering a lock for LUST a person with a featureless, circular head for THE UNKNOWN and a funny man smoking a cigarette for ARSÈNE, the errant protagonist of the story and the notional grandfather of its author, Olivier Schrauwen. It is rare that you will encounter a comic as completely straightforward as Arsène Schrauwen, so comprehensively direct and explicative that its front and back cover are dedicated to telling you exactly what the book means.

Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen