Page 45 Review by Stephen
Exuberant, comical, tragic and true, this has all the feels!
There is so much exquisite cartooning on offer. I do like the lithe-as-you-like titular Marsupilami with its vulpine face, spotted, tufty, leopard-like fur and its prehensile tail. And I love the energetically gesticulative mother and child. But oh how I adore the rustic Belgian homestead imposing in rain-soaked silhouette or low-lit as a glowing sun sets, ranching staked out across uneven ground as stone steps descend the untended garden in shorthand - magnificent!
Inside, poor Jeanne Steinberg, herself subject to so much gossip and abuse for having loved a German during the war, is trying to provide for her picked-upon son. Her son, meanwhile, drags home all manner of animal waifs and strays so that the household looks (and probably smells!) just like the Durrells' in Corfu.
"That's enough, Francois! You've gone too far! This is a house, not a zoo! An albino mole! An old cat with indigestion! Salamanders! A three legged dog! The only daytime bat in the world! And eagle that can't even fly!"
"A vulture! Frankie is a vulture!"
"A jittery hedgehog! A turkey who thinks he's a rooster! A senile garter snake! A half-paralyzed hare! An alcoholic workhorse! Two beavers who mate non-stop!"
They can't keep their paws off each other and pine upon separation. I think those are my favourite panels of all - too funny! And that old nag, necking any old bottle it can find through the bathroom window! It's Disney at its best, circa Aristocats etc.
And like Disney at its best, it captures the cruelty of man's careless, callous inhumanity to our fellow mammals. The opening pages in the hold of a tanker transporting livestock now mostly dead are dreadful. And, parenthetically, that's how our exotic Marsupilami arrives on these European shores. It escapes.
As I promised, so many ups and downs. including romance, rejection, brutal schoolyard bullying, provision for others and a magnificent menagerie of very eccentric animals.
The publisher writes:
"This sometimes dark—but always hopeful—adventure by renowned author Zidrou and celebrated gallery artist Frank Pe portrays a beautiful friendship between a boy and his beast with a magnificent adventure whose heart is the extraordinary friendship that can unite a child with an animal . . .
Captured in the heart of Palombia by Chahuta Indians and sold to exotic animal traffickers, a marsupilami lands in the port of Antwerp in the 1950s. Managing to escape, he arrives in the suburbs of Brussels and is taken in by François, a young boy who is a fan of animals and whose daily life is far from easy. François is picked on by the local kids, particularly because his father had been a German soldier, an unforgivable crime in those postwar years; a fact he and his mother cannot escape. Both are ostracized for their connection to past events.
The authors pay a superb tribute to the fabulous animal created by Franquin in the series Spirou et Fantasio while denouncing the mistreatment and trafficking of exotic animals."
