GOTLIB - Lot 184

GOTLIB MARCEL GOTLIB Rhâ-Gnagna, Audie 1979 Original plate #2 of the three-page story Misère de misère, prepublished in Fluide Glacial n°12, May 1977. India ink on paper 29 × 35.9 cm (11.42 × 14.13 in.) A precursor of Bruno Bettelheim's Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales (1976), Gotlib mixed several famous fairy tales in his parodies published in L'Écho des Savanes (1972), then in Fluide Glacial (1975). The context of this plate is a dream in which a mayor is about to give the order to raze the "Bois-Huon" to the ground to build luxury housing, and falls asleep on the job. In his dream, various tales appear, reproaching the mayor for forgetting the child he once was, in a parodic and sexual way. Less sexually transgressive than the previous pages (we won't tell you what Mr. Seguin does to his goats...), this sequence is nonetheless a particularly grating form of humor, not exactly "politically correct". Gotlib at the top of his game.