The French version of worldwide ladies’s life-style journal Elle has introduced its shortlist of 15 graphic novels in competition for his or her grand comics prize – Grand Prix de la BD ELLE 2022 – and the French editions of Alison Bechdel‘s The Secret to Superhuman Power and Jennifer Hayden‘s The Story of My Tits have made the reduce.
Asserting Grand Prix de la BD 2022 shortlist, Elle mentioned:
“Uncover the albums within the operating for the 2nd version of the ELLE Grand Prix de la BD.The luxurious covers don’t lie. The ultimate choice of the ELLE Comedian E-book Grand Prix is stuffed with every part, particularly the perfect: dedication and nostalgia, journey and melancholy, leisure and reflection, flamboyant colours and intense darkness. Fifteen albums and graphic novels are within the operating for this 2nd version.”
Whereas Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Power and Hayden’s The Story of My Tits have been launched in English in 2021 and 2015, respectively, each books made their French debuts this previous yr.
2022 is the second yr that Elle has run its Grand Prix de la BD. Winners are picked by a jury of twenty-five chosen Elle readers and shall be introduced in early December. The winner of its first version was French cartoonist Corinne Rey/Coco‘s Dessiner encore [tr. Drawing Again], a graphic memoir concerning the writer surviving the 2015 Charlie Hebdo assaults and the way drawing helped her by way of the trauma.
You may take a look at the total Grand Prix de la BD ELLE 2022 record of fifteen books full with translated synopses beneath.
Naphtaline, Sole Otero (Ça et La)
Translated Synopsis:
“The yr is 2001 and Argentina is within the midst of a critical political and financial disaster. Rocío, a nineteen-year-old woman, strikes into her grandmother Vilma’s previous home, shortly after Vilma’s funeral. On this setting marked by absence, Rocio recollects Vilma’s life, a narrative tinged with tragedy that begins in Twenties Italy. Vilma’s dad and mom fled the nation shortly after her start, when Mussolini got here to energy. Arriving in Argentina penniless, they have been unable to finance Vilma’s training. Vilma is pressured to depart college and is married off to a neighbor after turning into pregnant and being deserted by the person she thought she would make a life with. Vilma’s historical past on this patriarchal society is an extended collection of disappointments and sacrifices, which is able to step by step make her increasingly bitter. Vilma will finish her life alone, having reduce off most of her members of the family, apart from Rocio. The younger woman, who has many questions on her future, will attempt to study from this household tragedy. Bold, broad, teeming with many narrative and graphic concepts, Naphtaline is partly impressed by the historical past of the household of Sole Otero. The narrative spanning a number of eras, the inventiveness of the drawing and staging, the play on shade, make this graphic novel an incredible discovery and Sole Otero an writer with a vibrant future.”
Le poids des héros [tr. ‘The Weight of Heroes‘] , David Sala (Casterman)
Translated Synopsis:
“In Le Poids des héros, David Sala traces his early private trajectory marked by the mentor figures of his grandfathers, battle heroes and resistance fighters. By summoning his standpoint as slightly boy, he plunges us into an imposing and plentiful exploration of childhood and adolescence. Using the creativeness permits us to strategy the darkish areas and the issues from a secure distance, whereas recomposing a common studying and transmission path for the reader. With out forgetting the imperishable style of motorcycle races, the invention of the primary US rap songs, the primary occasions of creative initiation on the Emile Cohl college.”
Les Pizzlys [tr. The Pizzlys], Jérémie Moreau (Delcourt)
Translated Synopsis:
“Driving round Paris day and evening in his BMW on credit score, Nathan runs one Uber errand after one other to assist his siblings. Actually at one together with his GPS, Nathan plunges right into a deep melancholy when his cellular phone breaks down. After an accident, Annie, his newest shopper, affords him the prospect to stay within the woods with Zoe and Etienne in Alaska.”
La synagogue [tr. The Synagogue], Joann Sfar (Dargaud)
Translated Synopsis:
“It took Joann Sfar being on a hospital mattress in 2021 for him to lastly dare to inform his true adventures of adolescence. A era that feels responsible for having been born after Hitler and for not having the ability to battle him. Youngsters with clenched fists who inform themselves that the skinhead, center class youngsters who cross their path won’t be a worthy adversary for his or her grief. That is the story of the Jews of France who dream of being like everybody else however don’t know find out how to make themselves helpful when bombs begin exploding in synagogues. The Synagogue is a narrative that reminds us of the permanence of political extremism and the necessity to battle it, even when this wrestle have to be repeated in every era.”
Je suis toujours vivant [tr. ‘I’m Still Alive‘], Roberto Saviano & Asaf Hanuka (Galimard jeunesse)
Translated Synopsis:
“Roberto Saviano is the writer of Gomorra, a novel-investigation that describes the legal empire of the Camorra. Printed in 2006, the ebook was a strong drive and its success is worldwide. Sentenced to loss of life by the Naples mafia, Roberto Saviano has been dwelling below police safety for fifteen years. This story, drawn by Asaf Hanuka (Eisner Award winner), is that of a survivor who continues to write down on the danger of his life and refuses to give up.”
Girls With Weapons, Olivier Bocquet & Anlor (Dargaud)
Word: Accessible in English digitally from Europe Comics.
Europe Comics Synopsis:
“5 ladies from varied backgrounds are introduced collectively by destiny to battle as allies for his or her survival. A retired schoolteacher, an Indian who’s helpful with a bow, a younger, immigrant widow from London, a brothel employee who’s made off with the until and a fourteen-year-old slave who’s been put in a cage. This unlikely band of adventurers should battle off the violence males resort to when caught in greed’s ubiquitous grip. They’ll do it with arrows, pies, brooms, pots, knitting-needles, and a deadly revolver that turns into much more harmful within the palms of the sharpest-shooter of all of them: a young person who’s been whipped, locked in a cage and freed solely to fall sufferer to pneumonia. These ladies have gotten one another’s backs and don’t take kindly to the worst mankind has to supply.”
Nénés chéris/The Story of My Tits, Jennifer Hayden (La Cité graphique)
Initially printed in English as The Story of My Tits by way of High Shelf in 2015. The unique synopsis:
“When Jennifer Hayden was recognized with breast most cancers on the age of 43, she realized that her tits instructed a narrative. Throughout a lifetime, they’d held so many meanings: hope and worry, delight and embarrassment, life and loss of life. After which they have been gone. Now, their story has change into a means of understanding her story. Rising up flat-chested and extremely conscious of her inadequacies… heading off to varsity, the place she “bloomed” in additional methods than one… navigating maturity between her mom’s mastectomy, her father’s mistress, and her musician boyfriend’s issues of his ownnot to say his sprawling household. Then the youngsters come alongside… As most cancers strikes three completely different lives, some relationships crumble whereas others emerge even stronger, and this sarcastic baby of the ’70s lastly finds a goddess she will be able to imagine in.
“For everybody who’s confronted most cancers personally, or watched a beloved one battle that battle, Hayden’s story is a much-needed breath of contemporary air, an irresistible mix of sweetness and skepticism. Wealthy with each symbolism & humor, The Story of My Tits will go away you laughing, weeping, and feeling grateful for every single day.”
La ferme de Montaquoy [tr: ‘The Montaquoy Farm‘], Regis Franc (Presse de la cité)
Translated Synopsis:
“Ernest Loste, 20 years previous, a winegrower ruined by blight, arrives in Paris from his native Bordeaux. The capital is a whirlwind and Ernest prospers by following his ardour for vehicles. However he misses the land. In 1920, a stone’s throw from town, he found what would change into the Montaquoy farm. He’ll make it a pilot farm. The “Trente Glorieuses” [post-WW2 period of French economic growth via State intervention] got here and Madeleine, his daughter, took over. However she needed to adjust to the brand new necessities: regrouping, yield, mechanization. With the impoverishment of the soils, the strains of account weaken. And if one nonetheless harvests, it’s for the great thing about the gesture. At first of the brand new century, it’s Valentine who enters the scene. She leaves the cinema, London and plenty of amusing issues behind. She studied in CAP in agriculture. She goals. Her dream takes form. The farm will stay once more in a virtuous means. Historic wheat, distinctive flour, a peaceable land. That is the story of the farm of Montaquoy, within the Gâtinais area. An album of drawings and images, of reminiscences that type the gesture of three generations of farmers. Of their work and their days.”
Le secret de la drive surhumaine/The Secret to Superhuman Power, Alison Bechdel (Denoël Graphic)
Launched in 2021 from Mariner Books. Unique Synopsis:
“All her life, Alison Bechdel has looked for an elusive secret…
“The key to superhuman energy.
“She has appeared for it in her favorite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, remedy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong ardour for train. Snowboarding, operating, karate, biking, yoga, weightlifting – you title it, she’s tried it. “Oh, to be self-sufficient! Onerous as a rock! An island!”
“However as she will get older, her physique isn’t getting any stronger. And in a altering, typically overwhelming world, are “cantaloupe-sized weapons” all an individual wants? Perhaps the all-important secret isn’t the place she anticipated to search out it…”
La dernière reine [tr: ‘The Last Queen‘], Jean Marc Rochette (Casterman)
Translated synopsis:
“A battle-scarred man from World Conflict I, Edouard Roux finds refuge within the studio of the animal sculptor Jeanne Sauvage. She provides him a face and introduces him to the artists of Montmartre. In alternate, Édouard introduces her to the majesty of the Vercors plateau and the story of the final bear he noticed killed as a toddler. Within the coronary heart of the Cirque d’Archiane, he reveals the Final Queen to her and encourages Jeanne to create the masterpiece that may make her well-known.
“Within the vein of the good serial novels of the nineteenth century, The Final Queen crosses the destinies of the final bear of the Vercors and of Edouard Roux, the damaged face of World Conflict II.
“As in Le Loup, man and animal confront one another in a strong story, mixing ecological questions, feminism, love story and artwork historical past.”
Merel, Clara Lodewick (Les ondes Marcinelle)
Translated Synopsis:
“Merel, in her forties, is a free lady dwelling with out a husband or kids. Dividing her time between duck breeding, the native soccer membership and writing, she leads a lifetime of concord and friendship. However every part goes incorrect at a celebration throughout which she makes a joke concerning the sexuality of the husband of certainly one of her neighbors. A joke that may unfold the phrase that Merel is sleeping with all the boys in her small village in Flanders… The entire group will then gang up on her, making her life a dwelling hell… Clara Lodewick, a younger writer from Brussels, affords right here a debut ebook stuffed with graphic and narrative maturity, a social portray of the Flemish countryside that’s each correct and uncommon. Her tone and her drawing in direct colours will make you instantly near her characters!”
Monsieur Proust, Céleste Albaret, George Belmont & Stéphane Barel (Seghers)
Adaptation of Céleste Albaret’s Monsieur Proust,
“The graphic novel of Monsieur Proust, a basic that has been reprinted many occasions, on the event of the centenary of the author’s loss of life.
“Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust’s housekeeper from 1913 to his loss of life in 1922. Having simply arrived from her native Lozère to fulfill her husband, Proust’s chauffeur, in Paris, she entered the service of the author for menial duties, and ended up dedicating her life to him, embracing his reclusive life to the purpose of taking part materially within the elaboration of In Search of Misplaced Time (taking notes below dictation, pasting her additions on the well-known “béquets”). The girl who impressed the character of Françoise in La recherche would watch over Proust till the top. With the assistance of Georges Belmont, who collected and edited her reminiscences, she printed Monsieur Proust in 1973, which has since change into a cult ebook.
“This transferring testimony is a novel doc on Proust’s each day life throughout his final years and on the circumstances during which he wrote his work.
“In an adaptation that gives the quintessence of Céleste’s textual content and thru the grace of Stéphane Manel’s drawings, we observe the younger lady into the intimacy of Boulevard Haussmann and Rue Hamelin to find the inconceivable ceremonial of Proust’s days and nights. From the kitchen to the cork room, we witness the routines (fumigations, espresso preparation, and many others.), but additionally visits, outings and the monumental work of writing… Every part involves life on this ebook that delivers the sensory keys of this the other way up world that Proust made his kingdom, a world the place the boundaries between actuality and fiction have been intentionally blurred.”
Vernon Subutex 2, Luz & Virginie Despentes (Albin Michel)
Second a part of a surreal story. Translated Synopsis:
“Rain or shine, Vernon’s “gang” was again collectively. And a foolish thought – getting collectively out of city to bounce – turned a shared journey. They referred to as it the Convergences.”
A la recherche de Jeanne [tr: ‘Searching for Jeanne‘], Zazie Tavitian & Caroline Péron (Calmann Levy)
“One summer time, Zazie’s cousin tells her a couple of recipe ebook present in an attic. The ebook is that of Jeanne Weill, her great-great-grandmother. Within the household, everybody is aware of who Jeanne is, murdered in 1943 in Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp… However no one ever talks about her. What was Jeanne’s life like, a Parisian Jewish middle-class lady? Was she in love? Did she wish to celebration? Did she wish to play together with her kids? Or did she favor to go to social occasions?
“From Jerusalem to Dijon, Zazie decides to analyze her household, utilizing the recipes in her grandmother’s pocket book to untie tongues and produce again reminiscences. Little by little, Jeanne’s life takes form, similtaneously the veil is lifted on the household’s silence, transmitted from era to era, and on the collective silence linked to the destiny that France reserved for the Jews in the course of the battle…”
Le bureau des jardins et des étangs [tr. ‘The Bureau of Gardens and Ponds‘], Didier Decoin & Julia Bourdet (Inventory)
“Empire of Japan, Heian interval, twelfth century.
“After the sudden loss of life of her husband Katsuro, a carp fisherman and provider of the sacred ponds of the imperial metropolis, Miyuki should take his place to hold to the capital the attractive fish with vibrant scales.
“Carrying straw sandals, bent below the pole from which her fish tanks are hung, Miyuki leaves her village for the primary time and units out on a journey by way of forests and mountains. On her means she is going to go from temple to assembly home, she is going to face storms and earthquakes, the treachery of brigands and the cruelty of madams, but additionally the fury of the kappa, aquatic monsters that spring from the water to devour the entrails of travellers
“With energy and poetry, ink and colours, rediscover Didier Decoin’s immense novel and its unforgettable heroine Miyuki.”