Books by Blutch

A star of French comics imagines America--its movie stars, its history, its fashion--in these tantalizing graphic short stories about everything from love to, yes, the actor Robert Mitchum.Blutch is one of the most inventive storytellers in comics, and nothing reveals it like Mitchum. Serialized and collected in the mid-90s and never before available in English, this is Blutch at his most wide-ranging: from Puritan fever dreams to an encounter with a shape-shifting Robert Mitchum, Blutch builds stories out of his dreams, visions of America, and anything else he can get his hands on. Drawn in his unmistakable line that veers in a moment from crude to elegant, blotchy to crisp, horrific to serene, these comics show Blutch searching for new artistic frontiers. What he finds is sometimes surprising, occasionally unsettling, and endlessly fascinating.

In this freewheeling collection of short stories and vignettes, the famed French cartoonist examines not only the music, but the nature of the jazz sub-culture. The grumpy festival goer, the curmudgeonly collector, and many other fan ''types'' are the targets of his unerring gimlet eye. Drawn in a range of styles as improvisational as Coltrane and Mingus - everything from loose linework to tight pen and ink to gestural pencils - Blutch captures the excitement of live performance, the lovelorn, and the Great Jazz Detective, who is out but not down.

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome-seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels.Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch's own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.This NYRC edition features new English hand-lettering and is an oversized paperback with French flaps and extra-thick paper.