Social Fiction: a graphic novel

 

Social Fiction / Chantal Montellier
trans. from the French by Geoffrey Brock
NY: NYRB, c2023.
191 p.

This was a chance discovery from the new books arriving at my library. It's a collection of 3 graphic novels written by French writer/artist Chantal Montellier: Wonder City, Shelter, and 1996. It also includes an introduction by the translator, and a short interview with Montellier at the end. 

Montellier is a feminist and a woman who made her way in the very male world of French comics in the 70s and 80s. She's tough, and you can tell. All three of the stories here are futuristic and dark, and the drawing style is stark, in black and white, naturalistic. Wonder City has pink accents, which works with the story, but the others are monochromatic. 

I found these stories a little shocking, hard-hitting at times, a bit twisted, in the best ways of course. I think Shelter was the one that was most unsettling to me personally, but each of them has something to say about rich and poor, about totalitarian instincts, about herd mentality, and societal structures. The characters don't necessarily fight fascism or government control, they are mostly subsumed by it. 

I hadn't heard of this author previously, and so found the intro helpful to place her in context, alongside the brief interview at the conclusion. This is an activist who is writing her imagined futures, in a chilling way. I had no expectations at all going in to this, and so was able to experience these all new and fresh to me. Wow, it was a reading experience. Definitely recommended if you'd like to see the visions of a future coming to us from a prescient writer of the 70s and 80s.