Between nature and apocalypse – Muricas News

A tall younger man with lengthy blond hair and a darkish beard is strolling via an enormous, snow-covered mountain vary. Solely his brown fur jacket protects him from the chilly. When a gaggle of horsemen out of the blue seems, they seize him and take him to their village. However Simon – that’s the title of the wanderer – was fortunate, as a result of he got here throughout the clan of the Centaurs, a peaceable multi-ethnic neighborhood of nomads who, like North American indigenous peoples, reside from searching and reside in tents.

Simon’s bonds will quickly be untied. He's accepted by the clan, takes half of their rituals. The true enemies from the so-called “centres” are militarily well-armed and can quickly be taking pictures on the peaceable clan with futuristic planes and tanks…

Archaic and western backdrops meet science fiction – the French illustrator Claude Auclair (1943-1990) created the collection “Simon vom Fluss” from 1973 for the Belgian comedian journal “Tintin”. In Germany it was additionally revealed below the title “Simon – witness to the long run”.

Raised close to the Atlantic coast in Brittany, younger Auclair developed a robust love of nature. A number of years later, the nonetheless unknown artist tried his hand on the science fiction style and revealed his first brief comics in French fanzines comparable to “Comics 130”, “Underground Comix” or “Fiction”.

Nevertheless it was solely with “Simon vom Fluss” that he discovered his personal sensible fashion of drawing and, above all, his typical, haunting narrative tone, which was to characterize the collection till its conclusion in 1989.

A brand new version from the Cross Cult publishing home is now bringing out the adventures of Simon from the river utterly in German for the primary time. As a result of the primary story “The Ballad of the Redhead”, which, in distinction to the later colour albums, was designed as a black-and-white publication, was not revealed for a very long time because of a authorized dispute.

The story, which was impressed by a novel by the author Jean Giono (“The Tune of the World”), is already an especially highly effective story, introducing Simon who lives by a anonymous river.

The early orphaned loner – optically paying homage to the younger Robert Redford in his western function of “Jeremiah Johnson” from 1972 – quickly blossoms right into a selfless, however not superhumanly heroic fighter for justice in an archaic world, which is much from civilization because of world conflicts has fallen behind.

In what's left of a former city, an aristocratic caste known as the “Lords” rule over the peasantry, led by a younger redhead to revolution. In “The Slaves” (the third album, the follow-up story of the “Clan der Centaurs”), free-living peoples just like the Centaurs are enslaved and compelled to do arduous bodily labor in metal mills for a totalitarian state energy (the “Facilities”) that originally stays nameless.

The warfare scenes in addition to the scenes within the steelworks succeed Auclair very impressively and are paying homage to the upheavals of the twentieth century in addition to the present warfare in Ukraine.

It's no coincidence that the slaves within the metal mill seem like victims of the Holocaust with their emaciated our bodies and shaved heads. Claude Auclair was formed by the post-war and 1968 period. In a four-page flashback within the “Clan of the Centaurs” he has a recent witness retell the event of the final a long time: The protests towards the Vietnam Battle have been adopted by the oil disaster and world armed conflicts that created a brand new world order – and with it new injustices.

On the time of their creation, Claude Auclair’s comics within the kids’s and younger folks’s journal “Tintin” marked a turning level in the direction of extra severe, extra grownup tales. The tales about “Simon vom Fluss” are nonetheless touching at present via their dense narrative fashion, the drawings, that are plausible of their realism, and thru their timeless humanistic message for a extra peaceable world.