El joven Alberto es irónico, cruel, astuto y divertido. Y tiende a ser un poco insufrible con aquellos que tienen la desgracia de cruzarse con él e incluso con su mejor amigo. Compuesto por pequeñas historias, Yves Chaland nos ofrece risas y entretenimiento con su acostumbrado dibujo de línea clara.
Yves Chaland (French: [iv ʃalɑ̃] was a French cartoonist. He was a master of the ligne-clair style
During the 1980s, together with Luc Cornillon, Serge Clerc and Floc'h, he launched the Atomic style, a stylish remake of the Marcinelle School in Franco-Belgian comics.
Chaland published his first strips in the fanzine Biblipop when he was 17. During his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne, he created his own fanzine, L'Unité de Valeur, in 1976, with Luc Cornillon.
In 1978, they met writer/editor Jean-Pierre Dionnet who hired them for his comics magazines Métal Hurlant and Ah Nana. These pastiches of 50s comics have been collected in the album Captivant. In September 1979 he married designer Isabelle Beaumenay-Joannet.
He then created the characters of Bob Fish, Adolphus Claar, Freddy Lombard, and Le Jeune Albert, a scamp character living in the Marolles, a working-class area of Brussels.
Yves Chaland, was approached to draw an adventure of Spirou et Fantasio, appearinging in half-page installments of the weekly Spirou magazine. Done in a retro 50s style similar to his influences Jijé and André Franquin, both former artists on the Spirou feature. The unfinished story has been collected in the album Spirou et Fantasio – Hors Série, No. 4 (Dupuis, 2003).
He also did many advertising illustration commissions in his crisp, clean, "retro-modern" cartoon style.
Chaland died on 18 July 1990, following a car wreck, at the age of 33.
This is a collection of comic strips that were originally published in the 1970s and 1980s in legendary French magazine Métal hurlant, which is best known for containing groundbreaking comics by the likes of Mœbius, Philippe Druillet, Enki Bilal and Richard Corben. However, the comics of Yves Chaland are radically different to those of his better known Métal hurlant peers. While those guys explored elaborate, detailed, often psychedelic styles, Chaland employed a ligne claire aesthetic heavily influenced by Hergé.
Moreover, Chaland's "Le Jeune Albert" ("Young Albert") was a comic strip in the truest sense. I can't speak for other editions, but my 1985 French collection measures 23 by 16 cm, with each page having 5–10 panels. In this format, the book contains 34 single-page strips, one double-page strip, and then finally an eight-page piece at the end (I think later collections contain a few additional strips). In other words, these are short-form comics – essentially gag strips.
In line with this particular genre, there isn’t much in the way of story, the focus being on oddball humour. The comedy’s never laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the comic is nonetheless consistently entertaining, its approach dark and absurd in a way that sometimes even borders on surrealism. It might look like a wholesome, family-friendly newspaper strip, but it’s decidedly weirder and more adult than that.
The content is interesting, but what makes this comic really worth reading is without a doubt the visual aspect. Chaland’s cartooning here is absolutely stellar: the backgrounds are beautiful and the characters burst with life; there’s an incredible fluidity to the cartooning and the visual storytelling is flawless. The colouring (done by Chaland’s wife, Isabelle Beaumenay-Joannet) is particularly luscious, making great use of Ben Day dots. Put simply, the artwork is sublime, and as a result these comics are an absolute joy to read.
Nice collection of Chaland's funny, observant and biting commentary strips that appeared in Metal Hurlant in the late 70s-early 80s. The quality of the strips is excellent - it is the collection that gets the four star rating.
The foreword by Jean-Luc Fromental provides a light introduction to the strip but I would have appreciated an information that could have really shown the impact of the strip in the context of its original publication. The metadata for each strip would have been helpful in this regard. That said, this first collected edition was originally published in the early 1990s, when such attention to historical information was not yet in vogue for these kinds of projects.
Cynical hero, amazing art, some amazing strips, yet too many of the jokes left me cold. Highlights: Albert learns a lesson (old vagabond, madeleine, nightmare), Albert vs heart disease (damn cats have toxoplasmosis!), The Spartan Secret (loo troubles), Sociology (have some sticks for real fighting), Feet vs Man (no amputations please) Mrs. Strobaert’s House (war ruin) Belgian Joy (family fml) etc
I absolutely love Freddy Lombard, by the same author, but this wasn't for me. I'm not a huge fan of humor that "punches down" so it was a rough read at times. Different times, of course, but yeah....
Excellent, wonderful, and a bunch of other words that just about suffice. Taken by a car accident way too soon. Do not let Yves Chaland fall into history.