9th Art Heritage / Comics " Garde à vous !...Repos... " - TOUÏS - 70 years of graphic adventures: 1954 - 2024

TOUÏS?!

Jnever doubted that TOUÏS was one of the most missing of his generation.

LE SERGENT LATERREUR has always been a classic for me. The Sergeant's double-page spreads, discovered as a kid in Pilote, were unique in their lines, colors and minimalist subject matter, and immediately captivated me with their obviousness: unlike most of Pilote's comics, the Sergeant was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Every time, it was a punch in the face for Bullshit, for Mogul Authority. Let's reread the Sergeant, thinking of a famous midget who was president of this country recently, and consider the good it does us: thank you TOUÏS & FRYDMAN! PILOTE: The Comics Press allowed for Variety, but also for the Bizarre, the Extravagant, the Subversive. The Press authorized the existence of certain works that could not please the majority. BORDELINE COMICS FOR EVERYONE. In PIF-GADGET there was M LE MAGICIEN by Massimo MATTIOLI and in Pilote Le Sergent Laterreur by Touïs and Frydman. One of my proudest achievements as a publisher is to have been able to publish these two marginal and historic masterpieces in their first complete editions. After having, in the generation that preceded ours at the ASSOCIATION, republished GÉBÉ, FOREST, GOOSENS, MASSE, BAUDOIN, CARO, CHARLIE SCHLINGO..., TOUÏS was an obvious choice. The edition raisonnée of Le SERGENT took a few years, and was awarded the Prix du Patrimoine at Angoulême 2007, an award that really makes sense more than thirty years later... But it was at COMIX 2000 that I first sought out TOUÏS. ASSO wanted to convince as many prestigious elders as possible to appear in its 2000-page Anthology. TOUÏS wasn't easy to find - he seemed to be holed up somewhere! eventually we managed to find an address. TOUÏS came to the ASSO with a giant bundle under his arm containing 17 huge silent plates which would not only be included in COMIX 2000, but would become one of his most stunning contributions... This made TOUÏS, born in 1940, the oldest of the 324 authors in the Collectif (the youngest was born in 1982). Among the unpublished stories TOUÏS had up his sleeve, "MAI" appeared in issue 25 of LAPIN magazine (the same issue that featured the first episode of PERSÉPOLIS), just before the formula was discontinued. I'm delighted to find these stories again in the TOUÏS COMIX series! I have a slightly cinematic memory of TOUÏS coming to wait for me at the US train station (in the Paris suburbs, not in the USA), in winter, wearing a white suit and with a very large white dog. So distinguished! But it was clear that since SERGENT, TOUÏS had never had to reconcile himself with power and authority. Having been able to make a living from other things, TOUÏS never did anything but the comics he liked. Hence the incomparable freedom of his strips. Hence the absolute class of VIVIAN, aka TOUÏS.

Jean-Christophe MENU - August 9, 2016

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