DESTINATION ABECEDARIA – Blex Bolex

Published by Les Requins Marteaux – 2008 – France15 x 22 cm – 32 pages in colours – Hard coverFirst french edition which was later on published by Nobrow. Blexbolex, who received the award for the most beautiful book of 2008 at this year’s Leipziger Buchmesse (see here on the blog) was born in 1966 and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts d’Angoulême in 1984. He started publishing in 2006, with a detective story that combined an ironic take on all mainstays of the private eye genre, with a fearless playfulness in the art, combining ligne claire with experimentation and all the constraints in the book. Abecedaria is the tale of two bank robbers, Leon and Bernard Blanchet, and their decent into madness in the colony of Abecedaria and its outskirts, Katagonia. While we are still in the early letters of the alphabet, Katagonia seems to be a veritable paradise, but soon it becomes a hell, which doesn’t end until the two scoundrels reach the letter Z, and together with the reader they wade through “a nightmare with hints of dehumanization, to pseudo-scientific experiments performed on humans, torture, death”, as Papercuts put it.