This is not the first time Blutch has brought together the characters A and B. They were already seen in 2022 in La mer à boire, a first colour volume with an equally experimental form. Here, the artist abandons colour in favour of pencil, creating a work that is radically different in its tools, format and subject matter.
A and B: two lovers, twenty years of shared life
A and B are the two protagonists of this graphic novel. Behind those initials are Blutch himself — the B — and his wife Amélie — the A. Together since 2004, for around 20 years, they form the heart of a work that moves between autobiographical memories and dreamlike sequences. “C’est une histoire de notre intimité, mais qui n’est pas l’histoire de notre intimité”, the author says.
In Face A, the story takes a more narrative, almost adventurous form — “comme un Tintin” — with characters who begin with almost childlike faces, barely sketched, before gradually gaining substance and depth as the pages turn. In Face B, by contrast, everything comes to a standstill. The book enters pure contemplation, into “des grains de temps isolés et magnifiés”, with full pages inhabited by a single character, or at most two images per page, with no traditional panel layout.
Blutch, who won the Grand Prix in Angoulême in 2009, is regarded as one of the leading contemporary draughtsmen. In Face A, Face B, he works exclusively in soft pencil, with light blending that gives the whole a tone of grey and white rather than stark black and white. The settings, always precise, remain deliberately in the background so that the bodies and faces can take centre stage.
“Sur ce qu’est le corps, la matière du corps en bande dessinée, c’est sans doute une des plus grandes réussites du genre”, says Thierry Bellefroid. Nudity is omnipresent in the work, but never gratuitous: it serves a reflection on eroticism, tension and desire — more than on sex itself. Blutch deliberately chooses a fixed focal length, a 50mm view with no distortion, to approach the bodies with an almost sculptural precision.
A dreamlike chamber piece on impermanence
Face A, Face B is a book about the passage of time — about what one can see, almost imperceptibly, changing in the face of a loved one. “C’est un livre sur l’impermanence, sur le temps que l’on voit à travers le visage de l’autre”, Thierry Bellefroid says. We never leave A and B. Not a single page abandons them. This borderless chamber piece, in which anything is possible, creates a kind of contemplative cinema, still and hypnotic.
The work reveals itself anew with each reading. “Chaque lecture vous renvoie à de nouvelles choses que vous n’aviez pas vues”. It is the sort of book one closes only to want to open again immediately.
Face A, Face B by Blutch will be available in bookshops from 11 September, published by 2042.