Acclaimed French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, had a bit of a press triumph this weekend as the subject matter of his two award-winning books from First Second — THE PHOTOGRAPHER, the story of a dangerous medical mercy mission in 1983 Afghanistan, and ALAN’S WAR, the remembrances of an American GI in WW II — resonated with the Memorial Day holiday.

He was on NPR:

Guibert says that Cope wasn’t a hero — he arrived in Europe too late to see battle — but his stories are still powerful. He first set foot on European soil in the bombed out city of Le Havre, northern France. One day, while trudging along amidst the ruined city with their heavy packs, Cope suddenly remembered that it was his birthday.

“He’s in the middle of this world in ruins and he’s 20 years old, and he forgot his own birthday,” says Guibert. “It was very moving to me to listen to his story because it made me realize something that we all know, which is that war is always made by kids.”

THE PHOTOGRAPHER was reviewed in the NY Times:

The book has the feel of a film, attesting to the skill of Guibert and Frédéric Lemercier, the graphic designer. But there is nothing romantic about Afghanistan or the Afghans, who can be at once courageous and generous as well as heartless and menacing. Lefèvre, on the way back, is abandoned by his feckless guides; his horse collapses and eventually dies; and the photographer nearly succumbs in the snowy mountain passes. “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20-millimeter lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground,” he says — “to let people know where I died.” The next page shows his exhausted pack horse amid snowy boulders, followed by a bleak spread of the gloomy mountain pass. Lefèvre is saved by a band of brigands, who shake him down for much of his money but get him out. The physical toll of his trip left him suffering from chronic boils. He lost 14 teeth. But before he died he returned to Afghanistan seven more times in an attempt to tell the stories of those he first met in 1986, whom he could not abandon or forget.

And on Friday, he appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show:

We were so impressed by the above segment that we made a little screen cap:

Let’s take a moment to enjoy this image: a well known TV pundit (who reads graphic novels) is interviewing a world class cartoonist, with respect, about world events — not some superhero dying or getting married or getting zapped by Dr. Light — and she has the book sitting right in front of her on her TV news desk. (Dr. Juliette Fournot, who led the mission, is the other guest.)

And the result for THE PHOTOGRAPHER? We all know Amazon is a bit wonky as a sales indicator, but there has clearly been a surge:

Congrats to the First Second team for putting together this assault on Media Beach. And congrats to Guibert for producing work of such power and clarity that it is deserving of such attention.

This entry was posted on 05/26/09 at 12:28 pm and is filed under World Comics, Comics Still Wonderful In Spite Of It All, First Second. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.