Joann Sfar – författare

From celebrated comic author TONY SANDOVAL! Paris, 1900. For thousands of years, dragons have lived hidden from everyone, sealed in statues and gargoyles throughout the city. Legend has it that only the sacrifice of a being of great magic can protect Paris from their wrath and maintain their slumber. But when a roguish Hawaiian princess rescues a mermaid from suspicious danger, the malevolent shadow of dragons grows once again over the City of Lights. From the catacombs to the parvis of Notre-Dame, a romance is born under the awakening of a thousand-year-old evil. What if dragons invaded Paris during the Belle Époque? Writer Joann Sfar and illustrator Tony Sandoval weave their imaginations into a canvas of adventures, battles, sacrifices, love, and humor. A folkloric, playful, and liberating journey, told in breathtaking epic beauty.

Pascin, a biography of the noted Jewish modernist painter (Julius Mordecai Pincas, known as Pascin, March 31, 1885--June 5, 1930), is Joann Sfar's most personal and important work. Pascin is portrayed by Sfar both as a kindred spirit and an aesthetic revolutionary struggling to redefine an art form. Sfar revels in the artist's celebration of all things corporeal in the world of art. Though the story is drenched in sex, it is never eroticized. Created in a direct and immediate drawing style, Sfar focuses more on the artist's personal and sexual life than on his art, and brings Pascin to life as the ultimate bohemian. Joann Sfar is considered one of the most important artists of the new wave of European comics. He is the author and artist on a great number of acclaimed graphic novels including The Rabbi's Cat, Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East, Vampire Loves, and Dungeon. He wrote and directed Gainsbourg: Une Vie Heroique, the biopic of the illustrious French songwriter and singer. The film was released in 2010 to international acclaim.

Meet the original Boy Who Fell to Earth. Stranded in the Sahara Desert, an aircraft pilot meets a strange little boy who tells him of his journey from another world. The Little Prince, by the French writer, illustrator, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was written and published during the Second World War, to immediate acclaim, and its classic status has been embraced ever since. Whether as a children’s fairy tale or an existentialist fable, religious parable or political allegory, the “secret treasure” of its complex simplicity has only unfolded further truths over the years, like the petals of the precious flower of friendship it celebrates. Vividly realized here, for yet another new generation, by the award-winning graphic novelist Joann Sfar, this stunning adaptation celebrates the 80th anniversary of its French edition, and confirms its wisdom of ages: that life (and love) can be hard; that “grown-ups are very strange”; and that our precious planet is intrinsic with our universal Nature. De Saint-Exupéry’s aircraft disappeared in the wartime skies over the Mediterranean in July 1944, and his death has remained a mystery ever since. “The only reason to speak in riddles,” he wrote, in his prophetic masterpiece, “is to solve them.”