Comic Column: Matthias Arégui's Artist Story "A Dog's Life"

Nobody in the German-language comic publishing industry currently makes prettier books than Edition Moderne in Zurich - each volume is a work of art, especially because the design of licensed editions often deviates from that of the original in a different language and tries to better capture the specific mood of the respective story. But this also goes hand in hand with such great pride in one's own achievement that things that are taken for granted, such as the original title in the imprint, are simply forgotten (who could be interested in other editions of this story?). And Edition Moderne is also creative when it comes to assigning titles, albeit sometimes in a counterproductive way. The book we are talking about here is called "Un Nécromanchien" in French. The German title? "Ein Hundeleben" (A Dog's Life).

Now it is not easy to translate the play on words with the necromancer (a spiritualist who conjures up the dead in séances) into German, especially since the pronunciation of the French title also suggests "mon chien" - "my dog". But the title "A Dog's Life" sets such a different focus beyond the negative meaning of the term that one has to ask what the otherwise very reliable regular translator Christoph Schuler was thinking. Or the publishing management.

Especially since, despite all the beauty of the cover created for the German edition, the French original edition is sure to sell better. It shows the cute dog, which the German cover only shows in small form, as the only figure, and three times: getting bigger and bigger from top to bottom, until the animal's friendly face fills the entire lower half of the cover. But of course: if the story is called "A Dog's Life", then the dog's owner should be prominently featured on the cover, because he is the one leading the said dog's life. The owner's name is John Morose; as an unsuccessful painter, he lives in a small house in an anonymous suburban housing estate.

Another painter lives next door, a very successful one: his former fellow student Hans Dubonheur (the names again correspond exactly to the original, even in this German-French “Hans in Luck”). His house literally stands out from the otherwise uniform architecture: he first widened one of the small standard houses and then enlarged it with a futuristic glass structure so that it towers over the cityscape and allows the prominent resident a view (or one could say a look down) on all the nobodies in the neighborhood. Especially Morose (whose name, by the way, means “disgruntled”; because of the dog’s life).

But now finally to the author of this comic. Matthias Arégui was born in 1984 and comes from Strasbourg. Seven years ago, the Swiss literary publisher Diaphanes published a translation of one of his books: "Martin Heidegger's Grouch", the story of a beetle that eats its way through the philosopher's corpse. However, Arégui only created the images for it (the story is by Yan Marchand), and it is not a comic either, but rather very richly illustrated prose. The black humor articulated in it seems to have been attractive to Arégui.

There is plenty of that in "A Dog's Life". It is a bitter satire on the art world, whose protagonists in the comic are at the feet of the equally brazen and arrogant Dubonheur, while the modest Morose is ignored. The antagonism between the two men continues in the hatred of Dubonheur's cat for Morose's dog, and the constant fight between these two animals results in the dog's accidental death at the dramatic climax of the book. Morose has thus lost his most important source of inspiration, but from then on he receives a visit from the ghost of his deceased pet, and this support, which is supplemented by the help of a very lively and cheerful former art supply dealer, leads to the late rise of the misunderstood painter - much to the chagrin of his rival and the cat in the house next door.

The story is simple but enjoyable; what makes the comic great, however, is its graphic experimentation. Arégui has clearly learned from David Mazzucchelli's "Asterios Polyp", especially in the consistent variation of the page architecture, but at the same time he repeatedly incorporates painted depictions into his Ligne Claire, which is based on the North American "Drawn & Quarterly" school, which then reflect the art of the two rivals. The fact that this is terrible kitsch is probably intentional. Anyone who plays artistic personalities off against each other in such a cliché-like manner does not have a positive view of their own profession.

It is the American style of Arégui's graphics that makes this volume stand out from the broad spectrum of the Franco-Belgian comics landscape. It is hard to believe that its author has worked primarily as a children's book illustrator up to now, given his skill in using the idiom of comic colleagues such as Daniel Clowes and Kevin Huizenga (and a good bit of Luke Pearson, i.e. British influence, is also there). Twenty years ago, Craig Thompson learned from French independent authors and thus took over the American scene, and now some of the transformations he made are coming back across the Atlantic. Fascinating to watch, very good to read.