Friday Bandes Dessinées Day.
I should really have done this for my 'silent week' last week, I didn't get around to it until now. Here are some samples of my favorite silent strip of the moment. Plunk is drawn by Luc Cromheeke and written by his pal Laurent Letzer for the French/Belgian comic weekly Spirou. Luc is in fact the only Dutch comic artist working for that famous magazine, so there you go. Plunk was first concieved years ago as part of an exhibition about comics and merchandising. In the first four page story, a comic book artist dreams of fame with his character Plunk. In the last panel we see he was actually dreaming in his poor hovel of a room and the character he imagined being so succesful with is called Plunk because there is water leaking from his room making a constant 'plunk' sound in a bucket.
Years later the team took up Plunk again for a series of one page gags, which has run now for seveal years and four albums have been produced. The new strip features two sorts of gags. First of and most importantly, the weird silent gags about the Plunk character In those gags Cromheeke and Letzer try to reinvent the silent gag genre by visiting known subjects such as the deserted island and fairy tale situations, but always avoiding the obvious jokes and trying to give them their own slant. As n any strip, you may have your own favorites, but Cromheeke's drawing style always amuses me. So here are some samples. For more, you could also visit Luc Cromheeke's website, which I have linked on my favorites.
I can highly recommend the books, either in the French hardbacked version or in the cheaper Dutch softbacked one. Either can be gotten on the web (Amazon, for instance) Language is not a problem as it is a silent strip, remember?
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