The Madam & Eve Collection

Madam & Eve Annual's #1

by S. Francis, Stephen Francis, Gus Silber (Contributor)

The first collection of Madam & Eve.

Genres: Comics, Africa, Humor

Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Pen name of Stephen Francis
Stephen Francis, an award-winning writer and a radio and TV personality, was born in the US in 1949, and moved to South Africa in 1988 with his then wife, Wendy, whom he met at the South African consulate in New York City.
In addition to being the creator of South Africa's most popular cartoon strip, Madam & Eve, he has also written more than 28 episodes of the Madam & Eve TV series; dramas (Soul City and Zero Tolerance); and Soap operas such as Scandal!,

Stephen Francis, also does a great deal of corporate theatre work, combining education with comedy.
He is currently developing several horror movie scripts.

Reviews

[Gijs Grob · Rating 3 out of 5]

South African's most acclaimed comic strip started in 1992, two years after the nation had set on a path to end its apartheid regime. Thus the comic strip chronicles some important changes in South African history, and thus is of more than casual interest. The whole concept is typically South African to start with. A white madam (Gwen Anderson) has a black maid (Eve), with whom she spends a lot of time, but whom she never trusts completely. One page 13 it's revealed that Gwen doesn't even know Eve's surname.

Unfortunately, in the first volume the three makers were still trying to find their form, and the results are erratic, ranging from excellent to downright poor. But all the ingredients of their future style are here already: there's satire, there's nonsensical humor, there's situation comedy, there's meta-humor, there's some playing with the fourth wall, there's wordplay, there are puns, etc. etc. Practically all types of humor are present, and this would be typical for the comic strip in the years to come.

Nevertheless, in this first volume the steps are uneasy. At least the makers realized that the Madam and Eve alone were not enough to carry the comic strip, and at the end Gwen's mother Edith [first called Abigail] from England is introduced, adding another layer to the topics of alienation and racism. Edith would grow to be a wonderful character in the next volumes.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a good read.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unless I'm mistaken this was the first Madam & Eve book, and they had not quite got their full momentum up.Some of the jokes just aren't that funny, but on the whole this is good fun.