Nikita Mandryka, the author of The Masked Cucumber, died at the age of (…)

It’s a round number: 80 pins. Rational for a master of the absurd who went to laugh, since yesterday, with his friends Claire Bretecher and Marcel Gotlib in the hereafter, if it exists. He was one of the key players in the evolution of children’s comics for adult comics, but also for adults, in the 1970s.

Nikita Mandryka was born in Tunisia, in Bizerte, in 1940, where he spent part of his childhood before joining IDHEC (now Fémis, a benchmark film school in France and around the world). He made his debut in the youth magazine of the PCF Valiant from 1965, a weekly which then became Pif Gadget. It’s in Valiant that appears for the first time what already constitutes a deconstruction of the hero or even the superhero: the masked cucumber. Like his contemporary Kamb, he develops a humor that is both surreal and philosophical. Mandryka is above all a state of mind.

Decisive meetings

He meets at Vaillant’s another goldsmith of the absurd: Marcel Gotlib who was creating characters like Nanar and Jujube then Gai-Luron. « Vaillant might be linked to the French Communist Party, Mandryka told the journalist Jerome Dupuis from L’Express, we were allowed to do what we wanted. We hit it off at the bistro, next to the newspaper’s headquarters, rue La Fayette. We had the same idols: Tex Avery, the Marx Brothers and, above all, the American cartoonists of Mad, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis and Will Elder, Marcel’s favorite. I remember he bought a huge Elder book in English at the time. On the other hand, he did not understand how I could like Tintin and The Spirit, by Will Eisner. » [1]

Goscinny meets Mandryka in the presence of Gotlib

Photo : DR

Decisive meeting. Gotlib take her to see René Goscinny, figurehead of Pilot Log. There he meets Bretécher ” Everyone was in love with, including Goscinny », He specifies. He’s a little less impressed with the creator ofAsterix than Gotlib who sees him as a surrogate father. One day, he brings a joke to the one who was the editor of the newspaper: a story where the masked cucumber watches rocks grow in a Zen garden. Goscinny, who perhaps thinks we don’t care about him, finds him too cryptic. Vexed, with a wide gesture of the scarf (à la Gotlib), Mandryka decides to go it alone and publish his magazine himself, as Crumb and Shelton across the Atlantic. He convinces Gotlib and Bretécher to create Echo of the Savannahs, printed in 2000 copies and all stapled by hand by the trio in May 1972. Bretécher tries to sell them in La Hune in Saint-Germain des Prés, from where she is thrown. On the other hand, at the Mutualité comic book fair in the fall, we rob the stand of this newspaper “everyone is talking about. “” We have become the Beatles ! Exclaims Gotlib, all playing.

The newspaper became the flagship of alternative and humorous comics, the historian of comics Patrick gaumer says that it was this review that allowed comics to reach adulthood. They explore themes never before seen in comics: sexuality, psychoanalysis, surrealism… The original trio shares the number, 16 pages each, this rhythm will last only nine numbers. They are joined by many designers: from Petillon at Moebius who publishes his striking news there White nightmare , in the same way The Mad Bandard published under the label of éditions du Fromage.

But despite the intention to create a real press group including an SF newspaper called … Screaming metal (the title is from him), the operation is cut short. Bretécher joins L’Obs and becomes its own editor. Gotlib is also self-publishing by launching in 1975 Glacial Fluid.

Oh Mamy Blue!

Echo is taken over by Albin Michel. Mandryka left the newspaper in 1979 before joining Charlie Monthly, then Pilot before they sink. He received the Grand Prix of the city of Angoulême in 1994. At the end of his career, he resumed his series The masked cucumber on behalf of Dupuis editions, a series that he will continue to develop until today, the last volume being released in 2017.

The masked cucumber, basically, it’s an idea of Jean-Claude Forest. « Mandryka makes no secret of his references, noted Didier Pasamonik in our pages during the reissue of the first Cucumber at Mosquito : Mad, the Krazy Cat from George Herriman, American cartoons in general, Jacovitti… But we are also in a Dadaist and surrealist literary tradition: Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian and the College of Pataphysics are not far away. From where this erratic universe, these multiple linguistic inventions and this logic specific to the absurd humor, sometimes cynical, of the time: let us remember Pierre Dac or from Kid. »

Mandryka died on June 13, 2021, he was 80 years old, he was a free and irreverent spirit assumed who operated a real revolution in the world of comics. A master of humor drawing who created an iconic character. A whole era … ” Mandryka goes through much of the history of post-war comics in its most important phases, confirming if it was necessary to have its essential role, consecrated by the Grand Prix d’Angoulême in 1995. Pasamonik writes.

« Mandryka applied herself, but without relentlessness, to continuing to cultivate cucumber, he wrote again: four albums and a special edition at Dupuis until 1992, advertising campaigns which earned him a prize in Angoulême and a detour via the Web, from 2000, occupied him for a return to Dargaud in 2006 then, this year, in September 2009, with the first volume of The Fascinating World of Problems. In the meantime, the notion of author has been rehabilitated in the small world of comics. Mandryka and his hunted cucumber, still decked out in his black wolf, can come back to tell us their absurd fables. »

We sing for him, as a requiem: ” Oh, we have! Oh, we have, we have Blue! … “, The catchphrase running-gag of Pilot golden years.

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