Title: Hôpital Brut
Author/Artist: Le Dernier Cri
Publisher: Mark Pawson
Media: Book
Reviewer: James Marriott
I first met Mark Pawson at the London Small Press Book Fair a couple of years ago. Standing out from the other stalls selling self-published poetry and lower-end fanzines, he stocked a variety of eye-catching material, including garish Panter-style French comics, printed in a variety of weird formats and looking unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I asked him about them and was stunned by the price - they don’t come cheap - but he explained that they were really a labour of love, coming in print runs of 100-150 and with an attention to detail almost unheard of in anything so resolutely uncommercial. I bought some. And then more. Mark runs a mail-order service, selling cool toys, good fanzines (Anxiety Culture etc), weird books - from SubGenius to Jim Goad, copy culture artefacts, handmade books - and these French comics, published in Marseilles by Le Dernier Cri.
Le Dernier Cri is a loose-knit collective of comic artists who grew out of the Paris punk scene of the early eighties. They moved to Marseilles a few years ago and publish principally material by their members - Yves Blanquet (who has had material published in Fantagraphics’ Zero Zero), Bruno Richard, Caroline Sury and Pakito Bolino, to name a few. They’ve also published work by Gary Panter and Mike Diana, which should give you some idea of where they’re coming from. Ratty, fucked-up lines and extreme, offensive imagery beautifully presented, usually silk-screened, in day-glo colours on thick, high-quality paper. This kind of attention to detail given to this kind of material seems a peculiarly European sub-genre of comics. In Lambiek, Amsterdam’s premier comics shop, last year, I saw a load of silk-screened comics, and not much of it by Le Dernier Cri. There was even a huge, beautifully produced A3 book of silk-screened comic art by our very own Savage Pencil - going for about £100.
Le Dernier Cri stuff’s cheaper than that, although some of their comics go for £25. Hôpital Brut, the most recent Dernier Cri effort that I’ve come across, is a good introduction to what they do, being two thick A4 comic magazines featuring all the regulars. Mark had a couple of them seized by Customs, who probably objected to, among other things, the ridiculously offensive blood, guts and porn photo-comic about the death of our beloved Princess. The layout and presentation is amazing - foldouts, all sizes of pages, every space filled with bizarre illustrations - and the content no less so. It seems that every imaginable graphics style is represented here, with an emphasis on the extreme - Romain Slocombe’s illustrative work wouldn’t look out of place here, and there’s a clear embrace of things Japanese throughout. There are also text pieces on a variety of themes, from art brut (Dubuffet’s term for the work of self-taught artists, particularly the institutionalised) to interviews with artists, via pieces on the Angoulême comics festival. I can’t really recommend this, and other Dernier Cri products, enough. In a world in which fewer and fewer worthwhile comics seem to be made, there’s at least one source of quality material left. If you want to have a look, Mark Pawson, as well as running a mail-order service, has a stall at Camden market, which is well worth a visit anyway.
Available for £13.50 inc. p&p from Mark Pawson, PO box 664, London E3 4QR; website: www.mpawson.demon.co.uk