BAR2 - Lot 9

BAR2 JOE BAR TEAM Volume 1, Vents d'Ouest, 1990 Original plate no. 29, prepublished in Moto Journal in 1989-1990. Signed. India ink and white gouache on paper 34 × 39 cm (13.39 × 15.35 in.) While Guido Brasletti, Édouard Bracame, Jean-Raoul Ducable and Jean Manchzeck are the stars of the Joe Bar Team, another character also plays a major role in this comic strip. He is, of course, Joe, the café owner. It would have been a pity if this singular bistro owner had abandoned his counter to take part in the perilous adventures of his biker customers. Fortunately, Bar2 has remedied this situation by offering him the lead role in the plate that makes up this batch. "For some time, I'd been looking for a gag idea that would allow Joe to ride in the company of the other four lunatics. But for that, he needed a motorcycle. Not a sportbike. Joe doesn't have the profile for that kind of machine. A placid, comfortable motorcycle would suit him much better. But Joe's biker buddies are pure trumpeters, they don't know how to ride anything but hard, and their bikes are high-performance. And I couldn't see how such different types of bikers and motorcycles could cohabit in the same story. And it was while I was looking for a solution to this puzzle that I came up with my gag - or rather, the structure of my gag, as the idea for the punchline only came at the very end of my thought process. A thought that could be transcribed as follows: Joe would drag himself along, inevitably, and if the other four were to go for it like the lunatics they are, they would be delayed by the setbacks that such motorcycling often entails: crashing, engine failure, explanations with the marshals... All things that would prevent Joe from being dumped by his furious companions. It all worked, but I still didn't have a fall. And a punchline that, if possible, gave the spotlight to bad faith. And that's when I came up with the idea of the antiparasite baladeur: a tiny mishap that would allow the other four to have the last word. I should add that I took great pleasure in designing Joe's Moto-Guzzi. Its roundness, its slightly old-fashioned appearance, the picturesque nature of its components, all made it ideal for caricature.