Comics Alternative

This week Gene and Derek review two new books (both translations from the French) and the first issue of a new series. They begin with David Prudhomme’s Rebetiko (SelfMadeHero), a narrative centered around a day in the lives of five rebetes, musicians who were a part of the Greek folk music subculture in the 1920s and 1930s. The characters are outcasts, living on the fringe because of their love of rebetiko — often called “Greek blues” — and treated as immoral influences. Prudhomme uses the music and the lifestyle as a structuring device for his narrative. The Two Guys then turn to Pachyderme (SelfMadeHero), Frederik Peeter’s surreal, dreamlike story of a woman who is searching — searching for her husband, whom she believes to have been in an accident; searching for her young female piano student, who elicits in her some sort of hidden passion; and searching for her own sense of self as a fully realized woman. The result is a free-flowing, associative story that seems to turn back on itself and resists closur