Monsieur Jean: The Singles Theory, Part 2

Monsieur steps up and finally stars in his own book, with a trip to the country and a noisy neighbor.

New Point of View

Felix, the star of the first part of this story, doesn’t look so good in the second half. For the most part, he’s a jerk to Jean.  While he has brief moments of the clever and irascible wit that we saw in Part One, we don’t get much of that here. When he appears, he’s either mean or pathetic, rather than cranky and philosophical.

This book belongs to Jean.

Jean is a writer whose last book is three years in the rear view mirror.  He worries that there might not be anything left in him. He has a beautiful fiancee.  But he’s stuck with a friend like Felix, and another friend, Clement, who’s almost the exact opposite.  As Felix is the ultimate slacker who’s ticked off a the world and all its rules, Clement’s a busy professional living life much closer to “the rules.”

That’s a good mix of people to milk both drama and comedy out of.  Clement doesn’t do much here, but he is a good friend who drops everything when needed.

The Stories

The opening story, “The Upstairs Neighbor,” features upstairs neighbors loudly proclaiming their love for one another in a way that keeps Jean and his fiancee awake.  There’s also something going on with a toaster that raises a few eyebrows.  It’s hilarious.  It’s one of those crazy stories that don’t make sense, but it stimulates your imagination enough that you can’t stop thinking — and laughing — about it.

In the second story, “Playing Hooky”, Jean is interviewed for a piece on his writing career. In the middle of that, Felix interrupts and stops everything.  He’s in a very bad and very surly mood, and he pulls Jean away from an interview that wasn’t really going his way, anyway. Clement runs in to help talk Felix out of a virtual tree, too.  It doesn’t really work.  Felix is just a ne’er-do-well who brings pain upon others.  This story goes on a whopping 25 pages.

The next story, titled “Felix’s Elevator Ride,” has a desperate Felix trapped on an elevator and falling in love with the voice of the woman he hears trying to help him on the other side.  It’s a bit of a funny ending, but he sounds and acts so desperate that he’s just kind of pathetic, not funny.  You want to shake his shoulders for these ten pages until he snaps out of it.

The final story, “Jean Gets Some Fresh Air,” has Jean heading to the country for a quiet weekend in his future in-law’s cabin to get some writing done. There’s a change of plans, however.  The in-laws are still there, they’re having more company, and things go badly from there.  There’s a funny bit with a dog that ties in nicely to the beginning of Part One, wrapping it all up.

Bluer Than a Smurfs Comic

Comic strip artists from the newspaper days would tell you how important it is to have areas of solid black in their strips, to give them some weight.  While Dupuy and Berberian do use some smaller black areas in “Monsieur Jean,” they do most of that same work with the color blue, in a variety of ways.

Dupuy and Berberian use the blue in a few different ways, so I thought I’d cover them here:

Shadows (and and Implied Highlights)

This is a bright morning scene, just outside the door of Jean’s place.  As he locks the door behind him, the sun glowing from off panel right lights up his back .  The blue shows the shadow area on the opposite side of Jean, as well as the cast shadow.  The same thing is happening to his girlfriend here.  She’s reacting to the light from the same direction.

The blue shows the shadows, but in doing so also gives you the highlights on the opposite side where the light is shining by blue’s absence.

Foreground silhouettes

Helping to add some depth here, the side of Jean’s head is shaded all blue to effectively give him a silhouette to stand out in the foreground.  Dupuy and Berberian do this in a few crowd scenes as well, to push the people in the far foreground out even more.  Their details aren’t important, and putting them all in one color like this sets them in a different light and on a different plane from the better-lit person elsewhere in the panel.

Darkness

When Felix is trapped in an elevator, we know it’s dark because the entire panel is blue.  A little rim light hits Felix’s right shoulder and arm from between the cracks in the elevator door, maybe?  We also see this technique in the opening story when Jean and his fiancee are in bed at night. Blue means dark when it covers the whole scene.

Color or Texture

The panel gets added texture from the way the trees are colored in blue in the background.  That keeps the panel from looking flat and featureless. It’s a wider/further away angle, so there are fewer areas to add details with in inks.

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Here, the blue is coloring in Jean’s shirt.  That part is literal.  It’s also used for the neighbor’s hair and unshaven face for texture and shadow work.

Recommended?

It’s uneven in spots, but yet, the good outweighs the bad.  It would actually be a good summer beach read.  It’s funny and relatable and not overly dramatic or overwrought.

The best story of the series that I’ve read so far (“The Upstairs Neighbor”) is in this volume, and the most ambitious story, “Jean Gets Some Fresh Air”, is here, too.    Dupuy and Berberian have a way to tell a slice-of-life story with a certain amount of fantasy and irreverence that’s refreshing.

I want to know these characters more. Thankfully, there are more volumes to the series, so I’ll get that chance.

— 2018.021–

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