Tag Archives: writer: Patrick Weber

Léopoldville 60, by Patrick Weber, Baudouin Deville and Bérengère Marquebreucq

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Next in the sequence of graphic novels about the mid-20th century life of Kathleen Van Overstraeten, a young Belgian woman who we last saw smiling in Sourire 58 (and previously surviving Nazi occupation in Bruxelles 43). She (along with most readers, including me) receives some vivid lessons about the sudden end of Belgian rule in the Congo, as seen by a flight attendant whose friend in Léopoldville has a Congolese boyfriend.

The move to independence happened very quickly. In January 1960, the white folks were confidently talking about a transition period of thirty years; but in fact Belgium handed over sovereignty only a few months later at the end of June. The winds of change, as MacMillan said, were blowing, and the Belgians faced a choice between a quick retreat with little dignity or a military defeat with even less, and wisely chose the former.

The success of the book is the vivid depiction of Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) itself by artists Baudouin Deville and Bérengère Marquebreucq. They’ve clearly put hours of research into the available archival material to show a time and a place that were about to change utterly.

Weber does his best to explore the complexities of race and power in late stage colonial Congo, but has chosen to tell the story largely from the perspective of the white folks whose lives were disrupted by change, which perhaps is not the most important of the stories that could be told. (It is striking that only one of the twelve people depicted on the front cover is African.) There is also a political subplot, which is a fairly standard thriller involving (of course) the Americans.

It was a big deal for Belgium at the time. Almost 35,000 people are known to have taken hastily arranged Sabena flights from Congo to Belgium in July 1960, rather than stay in the suddenly independent new state. The vicious exploitation of the country and its resources and people in the earlier period is not really mentioned, and we get hints of the coming troubles in Katanga but little more than that. So I was left admiring the art but feeling that the storytelling was incomplete.

You can get Léopoldville 60 here. Next up is Berlin 1961.

Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville

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Monique, if you get off to a bad start…

Next in the series by Weber and Deville about Kathleen, a young Belgian woman coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Here she is recruited by the organisers of the famous Brussels Expo of 1958, with the Atomium in pride of place, and rapidly becomes entangled in a Cold War plot – not that dissimilar to Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58, which makes one feel that there must have been a lot of it going on. Lots of attention to historical detail (including the sexism directed at Kathleen), and successfully conveying the sense that this was an event which Belgium hoped would boost the entire country’s confidence after the war years, seen from the perspective of someone who was there. I’m enjoying this run. You can get Sourire 58 here.

This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next on that pile is Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari.

Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville

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The first of a recent series of six graphic novels by Weber and Deville, set in Belgium in the mid-twentieth century (later years are 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965 and 1968).

The framing narrative has the central character, Kathleen, cleaning up her mother’s house in 1960, and coming across souvenirs of the war years seventeen years earlier – the same distance that separates us from 2009. We are then plunged into an intense narrative of resistance to German occupation, mostly from a schoolgirl’s point of view, with a lot of real life events and people woven into the fiction. The climax is the publication of the “Faux Soir” on 7 November 1943.

Fiction based around historical personalities and events, whether on the screen or on the page, often falls into the trap of doing it by the numbers. I felt that Bruxelles 43 avoided that; we readers of course know that the occupation will not last for much longer, and that Belgium will pick itself up again, but the characters don’t. It’s also very neat that comics themselves as a medium are woven into the story – Hergé is one of the many historical characters to make an appearance, and there’s a sensitive exploration of the role of culture in general in an occupied society.

This is a good start to the series. Next in the sequence is Sourire 58, by the same creative team. You can get Bruxelles 43 here.

Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak

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This is the middle volume of a planned trilogy about early twentieth century Belgian detective Hendrikus Ansor, who Solves Crime. In this case he is brought in by Princess Clémentine (I wasn’t sure if she was a real historical person, but she was) to investigate mysterious deaths – apparently suicides – in the eastern resort town of Spa, which has given its name to an entire way of life.

Ansor obviously owes something to a later fictional Belgian detective, not least his magnificent moustache, but he’s a well-rounded if not always likeable character here, and the classical buildings of Spa and the royals and other celebrities are lovingly depicted by artist Olivier Wozniak. The mood of the book depicts a Belgium morally corroded by the reign of Leopold II rather well. I found the plot a bit convoluted, but I suppose that’s normal enough for a detective novel. It’s a nice one to have on the shelf. You can get Spa 1906 here.