“The Weight of Heroes”, “Shadow Life”, “Amalia”, “Leviathan”… Twelve comic book albums to discover

THE MORNING LIST

The postponement to the spring of the Angoulême Festival (from March 17 to 20), which was originally supposed to take place this weekend, should not prevent you from rushing to bookstores to discover the (excellent) novelties of this beginning of the year. Twelve titles have been selected for this first comic and manga list of the year 2022.

"The Weight of Heroes": the clash of colors and memories

" It is necessary to talk about it ! This maternal injunction, David Sala has never forgotten it. But how to evoke the unnameable, this grandfather driven out by Franco and deported to Mauthausen, this other rounded up by the SS and escaped from the firing squad? To honor their memory, the author summons his memories and recounts nearly forty years of family life as a child, first in his own eyes and then in those of his daughter. The result is of rare evocative power. The executioners have oversized hands, the forests are populated with flowers or thorns, the wallpapers are full of colors. If it were not presumptuous, we would gladly evoke Gustav Klimt or the Nabis painters. A graphic and narrative shock that already makes this autobiographical tale one of the albums of the year. Cedric Pietralunga

“The Weight of Heroes”, by David Sala, Casterman, 176 p., €24.

“I am still alive”: a permanent exile called Roberto Saviano

« Le Poids des héros », « Shadow Life », « Amalia », « Léviathan »… Douze albums BD à découvrir

Author of eight novels and collections of short stories, Roberto Saviano chose comics to tell, in the first person, his clandestine life for fifteen years. The bodyguards who escort him everywhere, the precarious housing that he has to leave as soon as he is installed, the armored cars, the potentially poisoned pizzas, the assassination projects... Until the new American identity which we decked out during a stay in the United States. The author of Gomorra – his novel-investigation on the Neapolitan Mafia – offers to read a dizzying dive into the exile without prison, if not interior, that has become his daily life. Along with biographical elements (his childhood, his mother, etc.), the Italian journalist adds the thoughts and moods of a man on permanent reprieve, superbly accompanied in this by the graphic verve of Israeli designer Asaf Hanuka. Frederic Potet

"I'm Still Alive" by Roberto Saviano and Asaf Hanuka. Translated from Italian by Vincent Raynaud, Gallimard/Steinkis, 144 p., €22

"Manchuria Opium Squad": route of a botanist-trafficker

1937. In a Manchuria under Japanese domination, Isamu Higata, a young one-eyed peasant and reformed soldier of the Guandong army, randomly launches into the manufacture of opium to feed and protect his family from want. And already, the crushing machine is starting in the Chinese and Japanese camps plagued by corruption and addiction. As brutal as the gangs it depicts, this story, effectively drawn by Shikako, author of the rugby manga Full Drum, autopsies the journey of a young coward but talented botanist who will rise to become the emperor of the traffickers. Pauline Croquet

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