Not only "blue tablets"

At the Non / Fiction Fair - a large program of Swiss literature . Among her guests is the commander Frederick Peters, the author of graphic novels about life as it is and what it does not happen. Fedor Panfilov tells about comics Peters.

Blue pills are the daily detail of the life of the boy and his mother, in the blood of which the immunodeficiency virus lives. True, the color here is limited by verbal frames, flowers and colors in deceptively simple in the appearance of a graphic story. Instead, there is a wealth of shades of black and white drawing, which masterfully conveys a story that is not devoid of humor and lyricism, despite the extreme seriousness of the topic. An uncomplicated love plot-a meeting with a girl who once liked the main character at a party-due to the everyday presence of a terrible disease develops into a new, much more complex history of intimacy. This story is not a fruit of fantasy, it is part of the life of the author of the “blue tablets” (“Pilules Bleues”) . At the same time, the Swiss-commander Frederik Prederik Peters, the Swiss-commander, manages to present it without angry exhibitionism, which is one of the main advantages of this graphic novel.

Wet strands of female hair after swimming, curls of the auricle, slightly sagging under the pressure of the keyboard button.

It is not surprising that it was the “blue pills” translated and from afar in Russian in the fall of this year. Although many years have passed since the first edition of the graphic novel in French in 2001, during which time he did not sink into oblivion - large circulations, prestigious awards, translations into other languages. And more recently, in September 2014, the Arte channel showed the television movie of the same name by Jean-Philippa Amara, based on this and another graphic novel by Peters, “Onomatopées” . Peters generally responded positively about the film, but without much joy he took how the creation of a graphic novel was depicted in the film adaptation. According to him, in the cinema "Creators of BD (graphic novels. - Ed. ) Are often represented as adolescents detained in development." And yet, in general, let for someone not the cinema of the level of “Adele’s life” (also taken based on a graphic novel), the television movie is quite careful about the source and deserves attention. Including because Peters' drawings appear on the screen.

In a word, if Russian readers, who had not heard of the artist from Geneva, will learn about him thanks to the Russian -speaking publication of “blue tablets”, this is more than logical. And yet, if they were given to me to choose with which graphic story to start acquaintance with Peters's work, perhaps the choice would not have fallen on “blue pills”. All stories told by the pen of a Swiss artist are unusual and remarkable in their own way. But there is one especially unusual. Peters himself called her “rather silent for a drawn story; The further the action develops, the more they are silent. ”

History is mosaic, saturated with images, with constant increase and approximations, a floating camera, unexpected close plans. Every now and then in the frame is a fragment, detail: wet strands of female hair after swimming, curls of the auricle, the fingers peering out from under the straps of sandals, slightly sagging the keyboard button, potato peel, crawling out of the knife blade, lonely suspended in the corner Ash ... All this is combined with the panoramas of heaven, the dance of the planets, the outlandish pattern of clouds. Cosmos, bizarrely shown on the opening sheet of each part, plays a significant role here, but the scale of the large is known precisely thanks to the neighborhood with the small one. Until the fact that in the course of the narrative, the appearance of the protagonist elusively changes - at different moments he flaunts with bucks (changing the form and style in the spirit of the other well -known hero of comics, Corto Maltese, then Pushkin), appears overgrown with bristled and disheveled or briefly shaved.

“Lupus” (“ lupus ”) , a graphic novel in four parts, began to appear two years after the “blue tablets” and also did not go unnoticed, receiving a prestigious festival award in the Angulum. With a stretch, it can be attributed to science fiction, since the external signs of the genre are evident. In fact, Lupyus does not fit into any genre framework. Spacecraft, ridiculous spacesuits, aliens, by and large, are needed only as a surroundings. Peters is eagerly playing with classic images and references, half-servant, half-servant: there is a parody of a duel-piercing pierce from a classic spaghetti westerne (only instead of an vulture in the sky Pterodactyl soars), and hunting for a monstrous whale (almost “moby Dick”), and gym visions visiting the main hero (like in the same "Solaris"). It does not do without a humor characteristic of an artist: for example, a T -shirt with changing fervent inscriptions or a field, diverse for Freudian appearance with fruits.

The main thing in the strange story told by Peters is to unravel the tangle of human relationships. The very name of the protagonist, Lupyus, was not chosen by chance. It makes it the namesake of the wolf disease, and reminds of Latin aphorism “Homo homini lupus est” , “man is a wolf”. Childhood, the search for your place in the world, the friendship of two absolute opposites, is ready to turn into enmity, the appearance of a woman who complicates the matter even more ... There is no place for frank autobiographics, as in “blue tablets”. However, it seems as if the artist put a fair part of himself in an outwardly fantastic story. I would like to believe that after the “blue pills” in Russia will be published “Lupyus” and other wonderful graphic novels by Frederick Peters. For example, “constellation” (“Constellation”) , the response of the artist to the attacks of September 11, or futuristic stories from the Aâma series - there is something to choose from.