It is in the special atmosphere of this first episode of the 48th edition that the Angoulême International Comics Festival, postponed to June, awarded this Friday January 29, 2021 its Fauve d’Or to The hunting accident by David L. Carlson on the screenplay and Landis Blair on the drawing, published in August 2020. The translation is signed Julie Sibony. It is an encouraging reward for the Sonatine editions which published for the first time a graphic novel.
The story : Chicago, 1959. Charlie is sent to Matt, his blind father, after his mother’s death. The boy thinks as he was told that his father lost his eyesight in a hunting accident. Charlie gets to know his father and learns to live with a blind man, also hanging out in the neighborhood, until one day the police come knocking on the door of the house to arrest the boy.
The event prompts Matt to tell his son the truth about his blindness, in reality a heist that went awry in his mafia youth in Chicago, and which landed him in jail. It was there that he shared his cell with Nathan Leopold, author of an atrocious crime, but also the one who made him discover Hell by Dante.
The story is true, it is that of Matt Rizzo, and his son Charlie, a close friend of screenwriter David L. Carlson. Musician, director, co-founder of L’Opéra-Matic, an opera company in Chicago. David L. Carlson first thought of making it a project for the stage, theater, cinema and music. After a meeting with the designer Landis Blair, they finally decide to stage this fascinating story in a graphic novel.
A true dive into the darkness of Chicago in the 1930s and into the panoptic prison universe of Stateville prison, The hunting accident is a subtle account of father-son filial relationships, transmission and the path to redemption. Irrigated by poetry and music, the Fauve d’Or 2021 is also a hymn to the creation and power of literature.
The two authors, David L. Carlson on the screenplay and Landis Blair on the sketch, worked hand in hand throughout the conception of this graphic novel. One year of research, one year of writing, four years for drawing, this is the time it took for the two novice authors in the field to come to the end. “I had never even read a graphic novel before I started, and Landis had never drawn one”, emphasizes David L. Carlson “So we were learning and exploring the process together”.
“I started out by reading all of Matt Rizzo’s original writings that are archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I also picked up several books on the Chicago Mafia. During this research Charlie and I had lengthy discussions. conversations about his father. After six months of preliminary research, I knew I had enough material to start the project “, confides David L. Carlson in the presentation of the book by the publisher. He adds that he also did a lot of research on Nathan Leopold, cellmate of Matt Rizzo, whose monstrous crime perpetrated with Richard Loeb is at the heart of the album.
“Landis took my screenplay and made sketches of each page. I enlarged them to actual dimensions and so we stuck the whole book on panels that covered the entire walls of our studio,” remembers the screenwriter.
The forty-year-old American designer, inspired he says by the work of Edward Gorey, confides in having particularly reflected on the way of graphically rendering the perception of the world by the blind, and the representation by the imagination “un challenge constant”.
“We actively researched writings and testimonies from visually impaired people to find out how they expressed their perception of the world”, he explains, adding that he ended up “describe blindness through a lens analogous to dreams and nightmares, a view that is anchored in reality but follows different rules”.
The writings of Matt Rizzo, his son wanted them to appear in the book, they are like parentheses, staged in stylized double pages, which contrast with the rest of the work.
The result is breathtaking. The reader is held by a tense narrative, literally absorbed by the night and the light of these pages, by the effects of a daring staging of boxes and bubbles, dreamlike perspectives, and by the hatched line of Landis Blair, which gives an incredible thickness and density to this moving story of nearly 500 pages. A Magnificent Fauve d’Or 2021.
The hunting accident, from David L. Carlson and Landis Blair
(Sonatine – 472 pages – 29 euros)
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