Saturnine

Alex Baladi

French, Atrabile, 2022

A coffin carried by the waves of the Pacific lands on an island. There, red-furred monkeys find in it a tiny girl and proceed to raise her as one of their own. Years pass and the young girl with a tousled mop of reddish hair grows up, gradually noticing that she is somehow different. Through a row of circumstances owing to both chance and a blow of fate, she is again borne out to sea, where she is finally picked up by a ship. It is there that she first encounters humans and their civilisation …

After taking an interest in the Tarzan story, Alex Baladi went on to discover a forgotten French predecessor, Saturnin Farandoul, known as “Lord of the Jungle” and created by Albert Robida in 1879. Playing with the idea of adapting the book for a work of his own, Baladi decided to transform Saturnin into Saturnine and to transplant the action to the island inhabited by monkeys that had already served as setting for his “Robinson Suisse”. And just as in “Robinson Suisse”, Baladi brings Saturnine to life with a variety of techniques (pencil, painting, collage) and also with a mix of genres (in every sense of the word). The outcome is a comics book telling a tale of adventure that is also overtly political, echoing both Edgar Rice Burroughs and François Truffaut’s film “L’Enfant sauvage”.

Title
Saturnine
Publisher
Atrabile
Translation rights
Sarah Lapalu (Eddy Agency), sarah.lapalu@mailo.com
Publication date
2022
Pages
128
ISBN
ISBN 978-2-88923-119-5

Authors

Alex Baladi

Born in 1969, Alex Baladi lives in Berlin and Geneva. He is one of the most prolific and eclectic creators of comics in Switzerland. The 60 plus publications to his name include stories of his own, experimental work and literary adaptations. He was guest of honour at the BDFIL festival in Lausanne in 2019 and, in the same year, published an adaptation of the sequel of Swiss Family Robinson by Baroness Isabelle de Montolieu. Equally renowned for his love of performances and his achievement in the field of graphic storybooks, Alex Baladi is also, together with Ibn Al Rabin, Andréas Kündig and Yves Levasseur, a co-founder of the Fabrique de Fanzines (fanzine factory).

Photo: ©: Atrabile2022