Boucq & Charyn, ‘New York cannibals’
Boucq already had some interesting collaborations with the American writer Jérôme Charyn (‘The Wizard’s Wife’, ‘Devil’s Basket’), but their real masterpiece came with ‘Little Tulip’. This melancholy and melancholy story of a survivor from a Russian prison camp left a deep impression. Six years later, the duo comes up with a sequel to the story.
The protagonists are now 20 years older and live in New York City. Pavel, the tattoo artist, tries to live a quiet life with his adopted daughter Azami. She now works for the police and is an avid bodybuilder. When her mother’s heart starts to beat, however, it turns out that she has taken too many steroids to give birth without risk. Luck seems to smile on her when she finds an abandoned baby in an alley. Couldn’t she adopt the child like Pavel did with her? But the baby turns out to be not just left behind and this is the end of the quiet life that the two had until then. It is the beginning of a nightmare that will lead them both to the darkest recesses of New York. And on top of that, a few demons from Pavel’s past show up, who still have some outstanding bills to settle with him.
Boucq’s realistic drawings are again unsurpassed, as we are used to from him. Just as he was able to beautifully depict the open, expansive atmosphere in the western ‘Bouncer’, he also perfectly captures the claustrophobic and gloomy side of New York here. Narrow alleys, dark sewers or dilapidated churches, you constantly feel like you don’t want to get lost there.
That atmosphere is of course also a credit to screenwriter Charyn, who aptly shows the hidden side of a big city that tourists have never heard of. He brightens the whole thing up with a motley crew of figures on the fringes of society. Pimps, beggars, gangsters … they all ensure the colorful population of this crime story. Charyn knows how to draw the characters effectively with only a few dialogues.
Still, there is some sense of lack, but that is mainly due to the fact that the predecessor of this story, ‘Little Tulip’, was so masterful. You sometimes think that less would have been more in this case. The story chokes on credibility here and there. The plot where the super-rich use the blood of babies to keep themselves young falls into cliché. And the generous Pavel can quite easily break free of any predicament as a kind of superhero, and we see that enough on the big and small screens these days.
Where is the time of the noir heroes of Tardi, Giardino and Munoz & Sampayo. Cynical goons in realistic stories who took more blows than they could deal.
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New York cannibals
Signed
Boucq & Charyn
The Lombard
september 2020
Hardcover
144 p.
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