Manu Larcenet’s “Microcosm”

Larcenet goes all out for the gag in “Microcosm.” It’s going to be a controversial book, as the humor in it knows no bounds and isn’t afraid to insult or offend everyone. The excerpts shown in this review are among the tamest.

 

 

 

A Crazy Experimental Humor Book

This book begins with a short story of Manu Larcenet — portly, perpetually red-nosed, back arched over a piece of art —  working on his next comic.  His two kids approach him and, with their stereotypical youthful imagination, see characters in a piece of paper with a lot of paint splotches on it.

This inspires Larcenet to embark on a journey of filling a 150+ page book with as many gags starring paint splotches as he possibly can. To fill the pages, the humor will stretch across a vast array of topics, from high minded meditations on life and death to foul-mouthed machismo.  The humor will sometimes be physical gags, sometimes be plays on words, and occasionally play off the art, itself.

Larcenet goes for some serious shock value in the book.  There are jokes about things that the internet would seriously frown about joking over: AIDS, cancer, rape, dead children, etc.  You also get suicide and mental health jokes.  Larcenet is bipolar, himself, so it’s easy to see where some of the humor comes from.  This is very dark humor.  You may find yourself feeling bad at chuckling at some of the gags.

This is a book where the nuclear bomb and serial murderer jokes feel like the safest ones…

I point this out not as a judgment, but just as a warning to potential readers.  This is what you’d be buying into.

 

The Look of the Book

The art is not, as you might expect, nearly as random as you might initially be lead to believe.  Larcenet designs these splotches, no matter how simply, to create specific characters. The example above shows this, where the cancerous splotch has a gray cloudy look you might associate with a sickly lung or the x-ray of a cancerous growth.  

Most of the pages have a plain background, and it’s just the spots front and center interacting.  But at times, Larcenet adds background elements.  Usually, it fits in thematically or literally with the gag.  It’s a little thing, but it always stands out from the normal cream-colored backdrops.

Occasionally, they help sell the gag, such as this one. The characters walk through the dark and scary woods, so the background gives you the impression of that environment:

The whole book is a great example of how to do more with less.  Nearly random splashes of color show the bare minimum of articulation — legs, mouths, eyes — to sell the gags, with lettering that doesn’t even use or need tails to point at the speakers.

It’s all in service to the gags, which is all that counts.  As with any book with so many gags in it, some miss the mark and feel like incomplete gags.  I think there are far more hits than misses, but this isn’t going to be humorous for everyone.  

As a bonus, the pages are all laid out sideways, so it’s a great reading experience on an iPad, tilted on its side.  It doesn’t fill up the screen, though.  This book is extremely widescreen.

 

Recommended?

It’s an interesting experiment, and some jokes are reaching for more than they’re worth. But the ones that hit well, hit hard. That makes the book worth reading for me. If you’re a little more… sensitive, you might want to try something else.

With his other works, Larcenet has already proven he can do big nose art style and a very high contract chiarascuro style. With “Microcosm,” he shows that he can sell jokes with nearly the bare minimum of art — just paint spotches.

It’s a simple idea, but that doesn’t make it easy. Preparing 150 gags based on one simple visual is impressive. That Larcenet does it this well with some wild humor attached is beyond impressive.

 — 2018.079 —

Buy It Now

  

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