Grandville Bête Noire annotations - page 4
This is similar in concept to the Directors Cut of Heart of Empire that Bryan and myself created: it is an attempt to answer the eternal "where do you get your ideas from?" question, and a way to showcase the influences and images that went into the creation of Grandville.
Below are the annotations for the Grandville Bête Noire pages 60 to 65.
We are publishing updates to this page every Sunday and we will cover the entire Grandville series. Also see the annotations to the first Grandville Graphic Novel, and the second, Grandville Mon Amour.
Start reading the annotations below, or jump straight to page 60, page 61, page 63, page 65, page 66, page 69, page 70, page 71, page 74, page 75, page 76, page 80, page 82, page 87, page 88, page 91, page 94, and page 96.
Page 60
Panel 1
Citoyenneté (spelt wrong on banner!): Citizenship.
Panel 2
The 2 characters to the left are the Belgian BD characters Tif and Tondu (various artists and writers, 1938 -1997), a pair of private detectives.
Next to them is the character inspired by the popular Franco-Belge BD protagonist Spirou, who we first saw in Grandville.
Panel 4
This is the doorway to Ladurée, a real café on the Champs-Élysées built in 1861 and situated more or less where it is in this scene.
Page 61
In this panel, we can see several doughface comic characters, including Britain’s first regular comic character, Ally Sloper, created by Charles H Ross, and his wife, under the pseudonym Marie Duval in 1867. Here he is, drawn by WG Baxter, his later artist.
Next to him is Bette Noir, a character created by Chrissie Harper, who worked on most of the colour flats for this volume, though I’m afraid that I can’t find an image of Bette online.
Here’s Blondin and Cirage, another Belgian strip (1939 – 1963). To quote Wikipedia:
“Blondin et Cirage is notable for featuring the first black titular character in a Belgian comic strip. While Cirage has a somewhat stereotypical appearance the character is otherwise far more clever and sympathetic than most portrayals of black people in Western media at that time.”
There’s a mural of them in Brussels.
A handful of smurf-like humans and Little Lulu, a very famous US children’s character, created by Marjorie Henderson Buell in 1935.
Next to Lulu are Archie Andrews and Jughead Jones from the well-known, long-running series of Archie Comics.
Panel 10
I vaguely remember that the two foreground characters were based on ones by French comics master Jacques Tardi, but am not sure.
Page 63
Panel 1
“Hello Kitty”: The sickeningly cute Japanese multimillion-dollar cynical marketing exercise.
No, I’m not giving you a link to it.
Page 65
Panel 2
The punter here is dressed in a costume referencing Marsupilami, the extremely popular French BD character created by André Franquin. He’s interrupted while shouting “Houba!”, the character’s catchphrase. A prostitute is dressed in a Marsupilami costume in the background of panel 6, page 33 of Grandville Mon Amour. The cat is dressed as Puss in Boots.
Page 66
Panel 2
The painting in the background is adapted from The Nude Maja, by Francisco Goya (1746 -1828).
Panel 3
The Cray Twins: for the benefit of non-British readers, The Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, were violent gangsters in the East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s. They achieved celebrity status and there have been several films and TV programmes about them.
Eugene Cray is a key figure in Grandville Force Majeure.
Page 69
Panel 3
This steam carriage bears an Alfa Romeo badge
Panel 4
“My little grey cells”: the catchphrase of Agatha Christie’s popular Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. The name “Poirot”, by the way, is a joke: it sounds exactly like “Poireau” (“leek”).
Panel 6
Here, LeBrock is crossing the Pont Alexandre III (Alexander III Bridge) over the Seine, and heading directly towards “Waterloo Boulevard” (the Champs-Élysées), where Krapaud Tower is located. The building to the left is Le Grand Palais, which features in Grandville Noël. Facing it is the Petit Palais.
Page 70
Panel 1
Boulevard Saint-Michel: in the background is the Saint Michael Fountain, created by the architect Gabriel Davioud (1824 -1881).
Page 71
Panel 5
This is the end of the Boulvard Saint-Michel. The automatons are about to cross the Saint-Michel bridge, heading in the direction of the Hotel de Ville (the city hall). In the background are the Préfecture of Police, Rocher’s headquarters, and the cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Page 74
Panel 6
This meercat is obviously a second-generation immigrant, who speaks without a Kalahari accent.
Page 75
Panel 8
This strange creature is an Emperor Tamarin monkey.
“The Court of Miracles”: This term derived from the slum areas of Paris which began to grow during the rule of Louis XIV where many people who begged in the centre by day, faking blindness or other disabilities, returned at night, when they were “miraculously” healed. These areas lasted as such until the 19th century. A popular myth developed that they had their own kings, culture and laws, inspiring scenes in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables.
Page 76 & 77
We discover how Billie acquired this facility with motorcycles in Grandville Force Majeure, along with some of her other dubious skills.
Page 80
Paris’s city hall, L’Hôtel de Ville. Here it is, in the background, of a page in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, my 3rd GN collaboration with Mary.
Page 82
Panel 3 & 4
“You god-dammed ape!”: A key Charlton Heston line from The Planet of the Apes (1968).
Page 87
In case that you think Krapud’s plan to subvert figurative art is total fantasy and couldn’t possibly happen in the real world, here is a excerpt from Grandville Bête Noire’s afterword:
In 1933, art patron Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Mexican artist Diego Rivera to design a large mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City. Despite Rivera having made no secret of his pro-Communist sympathies, Rockefeller was taken aback by the prominent inclusion in the painting of the late Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in a design that openly pitted socialist ideology against capitalism. Rivera refused to change the piece, resulting in orders to cease work on the project. In 1934, the mural was hammered into rubble in what was described by Rivera as “an act of cultural vandalism.” Thereafter, Nelson Rockefeller actively promoted abstract expressionism, a form that could carry no overt political message.
For two decades during the Cold War, abstract art was seen as a cultural weapon against the Soviet Union. The CIA spent millions of dollars promoting and staging international exhibitions of what Rockefeller had called "Free Enterprise Painting". In the propaganda war, works by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell were supposed proof of the intellectual freedom and cultural power of the USA, despite abstract art being deeply unpopular with the vast majority of American citizens. The CIA influenced newspapers, magazines, and art institutions, covertly funding publications that utilized art critics supportive of the movement. Using the analogy of the world as a jukebox, it was said that when the CIA pressed a button it could hear what it wanted playing all over the world. A conspiracy theory for decades, the CIA funding of abstract impressionism is now a matter of public record.
Page 88
One of my favourite panels!
Page 91 – 94
This flying machine is based on real autogyro designs, which I’ve adapted into an art nouveau style.
Page 94
Panel 4
The Cluny Crêperie: The Crêperie de Cluny is a real restaurant in the Rue de la Harpe, about 10 minutes’ walk away from the Hôtel de Ville, back over on the south bank.
Page 96
Panel 4
“We’ll always have Grandville”: As most people know, Bogart’s famous line to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942) is “We’ll always have Paris”.
That's the end of the Grandville Bête Noire annotations: next in the series are the annotations for Grandville Noël.