I'm an avid reader of comics, no matter what format or genre (though obviously there are some genres I favor over others) and it just so happens that several of the comics I read happen to be in French and haven't been translated into English. As such, this will be a recurring series of post in which I will write about some of these comics that I feel deserve to be translated into English. The first such comic I've chosen to write about is Patrick Cothias' and André Juillard's masterpiece
Les Sept Vies de l'Epervier.
In order to talk about this comic, we first need to talk about another one; Masquerouge (Redmask, yes it's supposed to be written as one word), which was a comic created by the team Cothias-Juillard for the children's magazine PIF Gadget back in the early 80's. Masquerouge took place in France during the reign of Louis XIII and starred a masked avenger clad in a red mask, who fought against corruption and injustice, as masked avengers tend to do. Somewhat unusual for the time was the fact that the person under the red mask was a woman, the young baroness Ariane de Troïl. Now, I haven't actually read Masquerouge so I can't vouch for it's quality, but everything I've read about it make it seem like a competently made, but fairly standard adventure-comic.
Anyway, in 1982, Cothias got the idea of making a prequel to Masquerouge, focusing on the origin of his heroine. Unlike it's mother-series, said prequel was meant to be for an older audience, with greater depth to the characters and everything that entails. This comic, which would soon come to completely eclipse Masquerouge in terms of recognition, was given the title Les Sept Vies de l'Epervier (or The Seven Lives of the Sparrowhawk).
The story begins with the birth of the future king Louis XIII. Meanwhile, a pregnant woman is running through the woods, she's being tracked down by her husband, Baron Yvon de Troïl and her husband's brother, Gabriel, with whom she's been having an affair. She tries to cross a frozen lake, but the ice is to thin and she breaks through. The woman manages to get to dry land and mere moments later gives birth. She wraps the newborn baby in her clothes to protect it from the cold and is found later by Yvon and Gabriel, frozen to death.
Furious, Yvon blames his brother for the death of his wife and banishes him from his sight. While riding through the woods, Gabriel encounters a strange blind woman who presents him with two birds; an owl and a sparrowhawk. She tells him that his destiny will be linked to one of the two birds and urges him to choose: The philosophical owl or the bold sparrowhawk..
Meanwhile, Yvon decides to raise the infant as his own and eight years later, the child has grown up into a strong-willed young woman named Ariane. One day, a mysterious man wearing a red mask appears in the church and challenges Yvon's closest neighbor; the despicable Count Thibaud de Bruantfou to a duel. Naturally, Ariane becomes fascinated with the masked-man's heroism and strong sense of justice and decides to seek him out, much to the concern of her supposed father and brother, Guillemot.
From what at first seem to be a rather simple tale, Cothias crafts a complex, elaborate plot which spans over several years and involves a multitude of characters, some of them fictional and others taken from the pages of history. Characterization is really the strongest point of this saga, with each character from Ariane and her family, to the french king Henry IV and the mysterious Léonard Langue-Agile (basically, quick-tongued or sharp-tongued) emerging as some of the most memorable and well-crafted characters I've encountered in comics.
I should warn any potential reader that
Les Sept Vies de l'Epervier is not for the squeamish. Cothias doesn't shy away in the slightest in showing the cruelties and injustices of the age, an age where the strong ruled over the weak and local provincial lords could pretty much as they pleased. Not that all members of the aristocracy are presented as bad, both Yvon and king Henry himself are both depicted as flawed, but sympathetic characters. On the flip-side however, we have the scheming Concino Concini and the Count de Bruantfou, the latter which seem to embody the worst cruelties and excesses of the ruling class. In short, this is not a comic in which the majority of the cast, whether good or evil, gets away unscathed (or even alive).
I've talked a lot about the story, what about the art? After all, the ninth art-form is a visual medium and while I can forgive a comic whose artwork is less than stellar if the story is good enough, the ideal is of course to have both a great story and great artwork. Thankfully,
Les Sept Vies de l'Epervier does not disappoint in that regard. André Juillard is one of the finest artist working in comics and he does an excellent job portraying the characters and the period they live in. Of course a picture is worth more than a thousand words and so, at the end of this post, I've included some samples of Juillard's work so that the reader can see what I mean.
To sum it up,
Les Sept Vies de l'Epervier is undoubtedly a masterpiece, one of the finest works produced in the medium in my opinion and a comic that's well deserving of being translated.
Artwork:
