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Grandville Mon Amour annotations - page 3
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 Mon Amour, pages 41 to 60.
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.
Start reading the annotations below, or jump to page 42, page 43, page 44, page 51, page 53, page 56, page 57, page 58 and page 59.
Page 42
The Grandville books are one huge homage to the detective genre. Here, I wanted a classic American-private-dick-roughed-up-by-cops scenario. One reviewer actually criticised this scene as “derivative”. That was the bloody point!
Panel 1
You may wonder where LeBrock gets all these fake business cards. We finally see his card printing press in Bête Noire, which he inherits from Stamford Hawksmoor, as see in Force Majeure.
Panel 4
Inspector Hound: taken from Tom Stoppard’s absurdist murder-mystery play The Real Inspector Hound.
Page 43
Rocher (Rocky) Racoon!
Page 44
Panel 1
A tribute to Donald Duck.
Panel 2
Arthur: the name of the eponymous aardvark of the animated children’s tv series.
“Porc” = Fr. Pig
“Terre”= Fr. Ground
“Aardvark”: Obsolete Africaans: aarde = earth, varken = pig
The character is a reference to Cerebus the Aardvark creator Dave Sim and his views on women, parodied in two sentences here. Although I have a great deal of respect for his comic work and his unflagging, ground-breaking storytelling experimentation in the 1990s, I find this aspect of his character utterly distasteful.
Panel 3
“The Old Goat in Vienna”: Sigmund Freud, of course!
Page 51
Panel 1
You can just about see LeBrock’s father in the front line.
Panel 7
A reference to Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. Rodin actually wanted to use badgers but it was considered too controversial at the time.
Page 53
Panel 4
The cobra “and the golf ball that killed it on the third green at Allahbad in 1897” in the glass dome appear in many of my comics, simply because it amuses me.
When young, I was a great fan of the daily newspaper strip Flook, written by George Melly and drawn by Trog (Wally Fawkes) and this artefact appeared in an episode in January 1968 (I still have a book of the collected strips published in 1970). Here are some of the cobra’s appearances (probably not all of them!)
Brainstorm Comix 2 From Here to Infinity 1976
Brainstorm Comix 6 The Omega Report 1978
1st chapter of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright 1978
Hellblazer Annual 1 The Bloody Saint 1989
Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes 2012
It even resurfaces in Grandville Force Majeure, 2017. Perhaps this is the 2nd-hand dealer frog’s market stall?
Panel 7
The 2 thugs are skits on 2 famous French BD characters:
Gaston Lagaffe by André Franquin
Lucien by Frank Margerin
Page 56
Panel 1
LeBrock reading while pumping iron is a simple way to express that he has both brains and brawn. See Grandville notes Page 45. This time, he’s reading a book of the work of the famous French writer Voltaire, the nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet (1694 – 1778), who was a proponent of free speech and freedom of religion. LeBrock is indeed a fan, as he quotes Voltaire in Grandville Noël and Grandville Force Majeure.
Panel 4
Odo Morse; Odo is an archaic name, used here because the Latin name of the walrus genus is odobenus romarus. “Morse” has nothing to do here with the eponymous hero of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, but was chosen because it’s an old English name for “walrus”.
Panel 6
The concealment of the locker key in a plaster bust of the last Napoleon is an obvious reference to the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes short story, The Adventure of the Five Napoleons, in which a purloined black pearl is hidden inside one of 5 Napoleon plaster busts.
Page 57
Panel 4
SNCF stands for Société National de Chemins de Fer Français, the French National railway network, as stated here.
Page 58
Crooked Dice (see Grandville annotations page 67) also produced a figurine of Mastock.
Page 59
The Gare D’Orsay was built as a railway station in 1900. In the 1980s, it was given a makeover and re-opened as The Musée D’Orsay and now houses a fine collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works of art, in fact, the largest of its kind in the world.
Now read the fourth batch of Grandville Mon Amour annotations, covering pages 60 to the end.