GIBRAT Lot n° 13

JEAN-PIERRE GIBRAT LE SURSIS Volume 1 , Dupuis 1997 Original plate no. 18. Signed. Watercolor and acrylic inks on paper 32.6 × 40 cm (12.83 × 15.75 in.) With his eye glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, Julien Sarlat, the hero of Le Sursis, watches his own funeral from the school where he is hidden. This plate has several interesting features. Firstly, it is literate, reflecting a complete sequence from the first comic strip, for which Gibrat was scriptwriter, dialogue writer and illustrator. Secondly, its style - line and color palette - brings it closer to the Anglo-Saxon comics of the heyday. Also worth noting is the cutout in the left-hand panel of the last strip, a liberty that Jean-Pierre Gibrat was to deny himself in his later work. "I was working on a smaller format," says Jean-Pierre Gibrat. "My treatment was less realistic than today - not to say more caricatural. Look at the little figures coming out of the church, carrying the beer... And think of Maginot, that dressmaker's dummy wearing an Adrian helmet and a Canadian! Style evolves in spite of itself, and so much the better. There's nothing premeditated about the direction we're heading in.