Gotlib was the hero of our childhood, this is a case heard. But there is a mystery: Gotlib was not a hero. He has never had any driving heroic and was a rebel to the quarantine, when he is separated from his mentor, René Goscinny, and he set out to draw dicks and étrons. It was great to laugh, but hey, it’s not raised it to the height or James Dean, or Jim Morrison, or even less of Rimbaud or of Che Guevara.
Hatched a very long time by his mother, Marcel Gotlib seemed so vulnerable that he attracted, irresistibly, a desire to protect it. Designer’s favorite Goscinny “Driver”, it is a party founded “the Echo of the Savannahs”, and then became head of the enterprise with “Fluide Glacial”, which celebrated last year its forty years. Employee-model boss of an SME, in sum. All his life, he remained a boy and anxiety, whose only rebellion was to try to fill the void left by the death of his father, Erwin Gottlieb, to Buchenwald. A hero in the sense of Oedipus, yes, but who are, in fact, would not have killed the father, and for good reason.
Gotlib, the god of our childhood, is death
the weapon of The wise children
Then, if he was our hero, he who was so wise, it is that we, its readers with molten admiration, we were wise children. Gotlib has given us the only weapon of rebellion which children wise: the humor in the second degree. Not the insolence, rudeness, or disrespect. No, just the humor in the second degree. The irony of it. Parody. Derision. (And all these sorts of things.) Laugh at everything, laugh at the adults who take themselves seriously, laugh at the general and the professor. Laughed at, especially. Without wickedness. The gag as a token of love.
It is necessary to put in the time. We are after 68. Our big brothers and our big sisters were on strike, occupied their colleges, erect barricades, light of the AG. the “revolt against authority”, will diagnose, Edgar Morin. Teachers, ministers, parents, bosses, chiefs, military, bourgeois, artists, scientists, doctors-all those who fax the word in the French society after the post-war are brutally challenged, mocked, ridiculed.
In this huge déconnade anti-leaders, there are two schools. On the side of “Hara-Kiri” and “Charlie Hebdo”, it is humor, “silly and malicious”, which snipes at every turn, jeering, mocking, in a ruthless game of massacre. “Pilot” is, itself, under the leadership of Goscinny, wants to be “the paper that likes to ponder”. The targets are the same, but the technique is more subtle. What we want to destroy, we begin with the hoist on a pedestal, in the manner of “Big mouths” that showed in detail the faces of the powerful men of the time: Pompidou, Chaban, Messmer… (It is not said enough: it is under Messmer, the prime minister of the Pompidou from 1972 to 1974, that Gotlib has designed its BD the funniest and the craziest. Glory to Peter Messmer, therefore.)
The day on which Goscinny and Gotlib were torn
Advice for big men
Héroïser before dézinguer : Gotlib has brought this dialectic up to the sublime. At home, the authority figures are glorified thanks to his trait which the art of emphatiser forms. He is the king of allegory and hyperbole. The great artist? Surrounded by a crown of laurels, He is making grand gestures to express the inspiration that comes. The commissioner Bougret? It bears handsome with his mustache, his pipe and his waterproof. Newton? The curlers of her wig would not have déparé the court of Louis XIV. The superhero? His pecs are hard as steel.
This is a time the great man asked in majesty, as a small detail comes to the debunking: Bougret has up his pipe upside down, the professor Burp crushes the bug, the “cursed artist” shows a pettiness dirt with his admirers, Newton gets an apple on the head during his nap. And when two warriors engage in a fight without thank you, this was during a game of ‘I-te-tiens-tu-me-tiens-par-la-goatee” (volume V of the “Topic-to-Brac”): 6 pages of red and gore like Tarentino, but in the end, the winner gets a lollipop.
10 things to know about the Superdupont of Gotlib
Gotlib makes fun of Gotlib
another difference that separates it from humor “Hara-Kiri”. In Gotlib, hilarity well ordered begins with oneself. Gotlib is the first artist to be featured in his COMIC strips, up to his caricature of a central character. Also, at the start, “the Item-to-Brac” was to be called “the Week of Gotlib”. With his square glasses, his nose crushed and his favorites, he has created an instantly recognisable silhouette. Silhouette which is itself passed through the mill of distorted graphics and its lazzis minutes. A whole generation has learned in Gotlib the delights of the self-deprecating – I’d even be tempted to believe that we owe him the passage of the word in the current language.
Four decades later, the art of making fun of the self has been overshadowed by the humor-vacherie, large valves that debase, the bashing leveraged by the internet. As to laughter of folklore here and there (today, it should say “communities”), who would dare to do today through the stereotypes of the colonial as he did in “No Japanese”? The indian goddess, the tragic actor of Greek, the zouave with a knife between the teeth, the jewish hasidim are caricaturés to the extreme and all turned away as gêneurs. Gotlib was because his humor does hurt not, did not, did not have recourse to the downfall of the other.
(One can also think of Zizek, who, in referring to the life in the Yugoslavia multi-ethnic prior to 1991, says that the best way to fight against racism, it is to circulate jokes that are racist all over the world, starting with yourself… That said, Gotlib screamed to the day when “the Pilot”, in 1973, made his one on “Hitler, the Fuhrer, which is all the rage”).
When Gotlib told her years “Pilot” with Eric Aeschimann and Nicoby
“Daddy’s gone, flower in the rifle”
And, precisely, about ” community “, the exhibition that he had consecrated the Museum of art and history of judaism in 2014 has cast light on the jewishness of the artist. The jews as a tragedy first and foremost. Gotlib is a child of the Shoah, and it is impossible not to see in his obsession of the characters héroïsés a need to restore the father figure gone too soon. But the déboulonnage, the second step of the process, returns to the melancholy of a child deprived of a father. Adept of the couch of the psychoanalyst, Gotlib has talked a lot about this kind of suffering.
In his autobiography, “I exist, I am met with”, he depicts his father, a portrait full of anger. Erwin wanted to be French, had agreed to identify him as a jew and wear yellow star, because it is the law, and that, if one wants to become French, it is necessary to comply with the law. One morning in 1942, when the police came to stop, he is left to take, because it is the law.
Dad is party, flower in the rifle, engage in the French army to get French citizenship. Then he walked away with his suitcase, behind the two cops, to get French citizenship. If it was income, if it was there, in front of me, I will ask him willingly if he would not, on occasion, agreed to get fucked by marshal Pétain. Just to get French citizenship. That being said with all the respect I owe to the author of my days.”
Erwin was his childhood hero to him; but the great man proved helpless to protect themselves against the nazi barbarism. Since then, the great men, it’s rather a good laugh…
“Gotlib is a scribe”
Fortunately, the jewishness is a culture, and in the work of Gotlib, it is expressed by an unexpected bias: the love of the letter, so important in jewish thinking (the “letter square”, said Benny Lévy). In the catalogue of the exhibition at the MAHJ, Anne-Hélène Hoog, one of the two commissioners, establishes a link between this tradition and the care taken by Gotlib in the lettering of the COMIC. Gotlib was a lettreur out-pair. In 1954, his first job was to fill it with the text in French the bubbles of the stories of Mickey mouse from Disney studios. In the 70s, his letters became more and more delusional, as real works of art in the work.
Rhââ ! Gotlib is death… but to read him ?
” Gotlib is a scribe who animates the letters, in showing their elasticity, their flexibility, writes Anne-Hélène Hoog. in unfolds It, loosens or rolls each one of them. (…) He deploys his letters in the space of the page or the check box, the load of tensions, makes them explosive or evanescent.” Untie, unfold, deploy, and laugh a full-throated of all the characters : such was the art of the good child, the hero of so many wise children.
Eric Aeschimann
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