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blackbird27 's review for:
Zekanove hvalevrijedne pustolovine: Slalomi
by Lewis Trondheim
Clicking around on Amazon not long ago, I noticed that a publisher called Europe Comics was pumping out a bunch of translations of Franco-Belgian comics, mostly only roughly adjacent to my real interests in the underground, arts-first, and clear-line classicist cartooning of the 70s and 80s. So I looked up the publisher, which turns out to be a consortium of major European comics publishers working together to break the English-language market if only by sheer volume. (The same trick worked for Japanese manga publishers twenty years ago; I'm hopeful but will not hold my breath that this works.) But what I was shocked to discover was that the first Lapinot volume had been translated and was available as an ebook; the second volume is... well, I just looked, and it's out now on Comixology.
Here's the paragraph where I would talk about how much Lapinot has meant to me over the years, except I did that only a few months ago when I wrote my review of Trondheim's 2017 revival of the character, so I'll just note that "Slaloms" wasn't Trondheim's first run at the character -- he made a 500-page wholly-improvised graphic novel in the late 80s to teach himself how to draw comics -- but it was the first to be published, in a black-and-white edition for Trondheim's own independent publisher. When Dargaud started publishing his glossy color stories featuring Lapinot, Trondheim redrew and his partner colored "Slaloms" as #0 in the series.
Plotwise, it's essentially a sitcom episode: a shaggy-dog story of friends getting together for a vacation at an Alpine ski resort where one of them rents a cabin and there's a media frenzy around the possibility of wolf attacks. The interplay between personalities, the beautifully loose cartooning, and Trondheim's pitch-perfect dialogue and timing are the pleasures of the comic. Trondheim's creative restlessness would push the comic in many different directions over the next decade, but the baseline low-key, even slackerly, charm of "Slaloms" would stay with it forever.
The translation is good, if a touch perfunctory (Kim Thompson's facility for coming up with unlikely slang that brings out the freewheeling spirit of the original is missed), but I'm mostly just shocked that it's in English at all. It's been twenty years. Where did the time go?
Here's the paragraph where I would talk about how much Lapinot has meant to me over the years, except I did that only a few months ago when I wrote my review of Trondheim's 2017 revival of the character, so I'll just note that "Slaloms" wasn't Trondheim's first run at the character -- he made a 500-page wholly-improvised graphic novel in the late 80s to teach himself how to draw comics -- but it was the first to be published, in a black-and-white edition for Trondheim's own independent publisher. When Dargaud started publishing his glossy color stories featuring Lapinot, Trondheim redrew and his partner colored "Slaloms" as #0 in the series.
Plotwise, it's essentially a sitcom episode: a shaggy-dog story of friends getting together for a vacation at an Alpine ski resort where one of them rents a cabin and there's a media frenzy around the possibility of wolf attacks. The interplay between personalities, the beautifully loose cartooning, and Trondheim's pitch-perfect dialogue and timing are the pleasures of the comic. Trondheim's creative restlessness would push the comic in many different directions over the next decade, but the baseline low-key, even slackerly, charm of "Slaloms" would stay with it forever.
The translation is good, if a touch perfunctory (Kim Thompson's facility for coming up with unlikely slang that brings out the freewheeling spirit of the original is missed), but I'm mostly just shocked that it's in English at all. It's been twenty years. Where did the time go?