"Les Jolies Filles" is an amazing square album from Germany that has everything to enter the category of editorial favorites. The author, Flix, offers the reader more or less realistic situations concerning the sentimental life of a whole bunch of diverse and varied girls in one-sheet stories.
On our side of the Rhine, we often caricature our German neighbours as people who are too serious and reluctant to make a fuss, making them the subject of simplistic jokes such as "a century of German humor fits on a sheet! »
Flix proves with talent to the French comic book lover that we know very well how to make the spirit across the Rhine, and not only do we know, but we do it very well.
His album, in an already unconventional format, is a pleasant surprise. We appreciate the care taken with the object and the construction of the "gags" – if we can really call it that. Because if they are indeed short stories in one board, it is not always necessarily a question for the author to make the one who reads them laugh. On the contrary, some pages are really sad, but always fair and often subtle. There is not the slightest trace of bad taste or vulgarity in the pages of Flix. And that's always appreciated.
His drawing is both simple and precise, chubby and sympathetic, and he uses the page itself to structure his stories; Its formatting feeds its narrative as much as the content of these. It is alternately zany, cute, cruel, sad, cheerful, tragic, incomprehensible, burlesque, touching, poetic or delirious, but it is always finely observed, and we have a lot of fun observing these beautifully colored and particularly expressive sketches. And it is curiously on the side of Claire Brétécher that we can find points of contact, especially in some tasty dialogues, if we wish at all costs to find comparative references.
A very good initiative of Glénat therefore, which, by publishing Les Jolies Filles, allows us to discover an author full of talent. Note that the album includes more than one hundred and twenty pages, but the plates appear exclusively on the pages on the right. So there are only about sixty stories.
