Boulet’s Notes: Back in Time

Although he’s not yet 50, it’s fair to say that Gilles Roussel, working under the nom de guerre Boulet, is one of the giants of French cartooning. You’d be forgiven for not knowing it, though; relatively few of his works have been translated into English despite his having collaborated with everyone from Monty Python’s Terry Jones (on the French-language edition of Erik the Viking) and Zach Weinersmith, with whom he put out two charming adaptations of mythical tales, Augie and the Green Knight and Bea Wolf. At home he’s a legend, but in the English-speaking world, he’s still a bit of a unknown quantity.

Oni Press is hoping to change that with the first collection in English of his long-running blog BD (webcomic) Notes. He’s been publishing thousands of entries, ranging from tourist narratives to gag strips and shaggy dog stories to cranky personal gripes, on his website since 2004. Now, as Notes – which has published over a dozen collected volumes in French by Delcourt – celebrates its 20th anniversary, Oni is betting that English-speaking audiences will find it just as delightful. The first volume of a proposed ongoing series, Back in Time, is out in a handsome portable volume with a price tag that’s a bit steep, but well worth it.

Back in Time collects the first three Delcourt volumes of Notes, originally published in French in 2008 and 2009 and containing material ranging from a year to a half-decade earlier. Oni has gone all out with the production – quality paper, excellent use of color (mixing standard black-and-white with two-tone – usually a judiciously chosen and thematic orange – and occasional full color), and solid hardback covers. There’s also an engaging if brief interview with Boulet by translator François Vigneault that sheds a lot of light on both the process and the history of Notes. It’s a handsome volume worthy of Boulet’s status.

Boulet began creating Notes more or less for his own amusement in the pre-Facebook era, when blog BDs in France were beginning to take on a flavor of their own contemporaneous to the explosion of webcomics in America. He found himself in the company of emerging names like Lewis Trondheim (who he would replace as artist of Donjon Zénith, published in English as Dungeon), Christophe Blaine, Lisa Mandel, and Joann Sfar. Compelled by the liberatory qualities and freedom of online publishing, he began Notes more or less as a personal diary and was shocked when it found an exponentially increasing audience.

There are moments when Boulet seems a bit hesitant to discuss how influential and beloved Notes has become. “When I’m doing a full book, I feel like I’m cooking a meal,” he explains in the interview. “Notes would be like a bowl of peanuts. Everyone loves peanuts … but I was afraid just to be remembered as a guy who served peanuts all his life!” He shouldn’t worry, though; Back in Time covers a particularly fecund period of Boulet’s life, a period in his early 30s when, having never before left his native France, he found himself traveling around the world, from China to Canada to Cameroon, which provided him with more than enough material to pull readers into his particular wavelength.

Boulet’s visual style is distinct without being too idiosyncratic. Readers familiar with the contemporary French comics style will recognize it right away: expressive, slightly simian faces; light shadings and crosshatching to create depth, shadow, and tone; and a scratchy, clear lettering style that might as well be a tricolor. But he truly excels when he strays slightly (or widely) from that style, as excellently assayed as it is. When he wants to illustrate places, things, and people he’s encountered on his travels, he eases effortlessly into a more realistic formal drawing that recalls a loose sort of textbook drawing, and when he’s engaged in a flight of fancy, his work takes on a lighter touch, pale and pastel, with finer lines and cleaner detail, that recalls Mœbius and Chantal Montellier.

Reading through Notes, you can see Boulet’s art and writing improve markedly. Early installments are fairly standard gags about culture shock, tech headaches, and travel hassles with a pretty rote sarcasm driving them, but as he becomes more confident in himself and the medium, the stories open up and become funnier, warmer, more interesting, and more curious. It’s also fascinating to see how his art style transforms to suit the subject: nearly perfect graphic artistry when portraying natural life, dark shadowy pools for stories set on the Metro, a freewheeling cartoon style for stories about reckless youth. (There’s also a running gag about everyone telling him how much they love Craig Thompson that gets funnier every time it appears.)

There’s more here than just reprints of old material, as well; particularly rewarding are contemporary comics acting as framing devices for older stories, or new chapters to early material expanding and deepening the narrative, often in a way that adds to the humor in retrospect. This allows him to expand on old favorites like “Leftovers”, a multi-part story about having to clean up a moldy, mephitic pot of rotten potatoes cooked by his roommate, and “For Louis”, a slow-boil of a running gag about a fan making constant and unreasonable demands on behalf of his godson. Other standouts include the clever “Not-So-Fantastic Planet”, “Mirror, Mirror”, a visually imaginative bit about how we perceive and portray ourselves in art, and “Vive la Révolution!”, a hilarious tale of the tension between political protest and personal desire (in which Boulet employs a trademark bit of ‘protecting’ his friends’ identities in stories by portraying them as famous people, in this case Scarlett O’Hara).

Notes may not be a masterpiece of cartooning, but it’s filled with delightful highs and plenty of great moments, and best of all, it acts as a great introduction to Boulet, one of the most vital contemporary French cartoonists, for English-speaking readers. While it may not be his absolute best work, it’s still extremely worthwhile, and more importantly, it will leave you wanting more – more Notes, and more Boulet. Let’s hope there’s plenty more to come for the audience this edition is likely to create.

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