Ruppert and Mulot, two of France’s most innovative comic creators, teamed up with multiple Angouleme prize winner Bastien Vivès to create a new original graphic novel The Grande Odalisque, coming February 2021 from Fantagraphics.
The Grande Odalisque follows Alex and Carole, friends since childhood and literal partners in crime, as they attempt the ultimate heist – to steal Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque from the Louvre in Paris. To help with the job, they bring in Clarence, a bureaucrat’s son with a price on his head by a Mexican drug cartel and, more importantly, an arms dealer. Next is Sam, a stunt motorcyclist and boxer by trade, who proves trigger happy with tranquilizer darts. Using soda can smoke bombs, rocket launchers, and hang gliders, Alex, Carole, and Sam set off a set of circumstances that results in a battle with the French Special Forces – and their partnership, which was already on the rocks, may never be the same again.
Publisher’s Weekly called The Grande Odalisque, “a delicious caper with all the trimmings” and goes on to say, “While thrilling action set pieces abound—battles with a Mexican drug cartel and a motorcycle chase through the Louvre among them—the comic’s heart is the relationship between the characters.” Read the full review here.
Fans of these creators should also check out Ruppert and Mulot’s The Perineum Technique, a surreal graphic novel that explores sex and celibacy in the dating app era through wildly inventive visual metaphor. The duo also collaborated with acclaimed Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen in 2020 on Portrait of a Drunk, which tells the tale of Guy, an 18th-century pirate who’s more gallows fodder than a Hollywood swashbuckler. And last but not least, you can also preorder The Butchery, in which Bastien Vivès explores the emotional bloodbath of a romance gone awry. That’s coming in August of 2021!