Minimalism — even willful primitivism — has enjoyed some favor as a mode of stylistic expression in comics for several years now. Reasons may include a desire to escape the conventions that historically dominate comic book art — to get away from "thick-and-thin" lines and "dynamic anatomy" in order to engage more directly the fundamental elements of the form. Of course, a poorly considered minimalism atop a poorly considered structure is a failure on at least two counts. Examples abound. Whether or not minimalism is the boulevard to formal breakthrough would seem to have more to do with a given artist's own inclinations than with the inherent qualities of style. First and fundamentally, minimalism offers the opportunity to most starkly articulate the necessary — the essential — details that tell. Graphic minimalism applied to comics can offer the opportunity to multiply that approach, re-calibrated in varying degrees across several panels.
Most likely, little of this was on the mind of Luc Leplae when he sat down to write his autobiography in comics form. According to the brief biography at the end of
War Time and Play Time, Leplae was born in Belgium in 1930 "and spent his youth under the German occupation. He became a physicist and moved to the US in 1957. In 1993 he got a liver transplant and was forced to retire. After that, he decided to write his autobiography in the form of comics." At some point before his death in 2000, Leplae put his comics stories online via a website (
www.lucscomics.com). In 2003, Leplae's family published
War Time and Play Time, which collects several stories about Leplae's youth in occupied Belgium (these, along with a number of other stories, continue to be available online). If it remains unclear why Leplae chose to tell his story in comics form,
War Time and Play Time indirectly explains why his comics took the form that they did.
Leplae's interest in science is evident from the beginning. For Luco (as the young Leplae is often called), "play time" often revolves around precocious scientific experimentation — with mixed results. In one story, Luco and his friends successfully record sound onto a wax disk — ruining the family record player in the process. In another story, Luco successfully distills alcohol from local cherries. In the aftermath, a family friend inadvertently drinks some potentially dangerous ether (fortunately, he has a pretty good time and escapes harm). Leplae treats these situations with some humor, but takes his recollections of embarrassment and guilt seriously. Never overwrought, these incidents are keenly recalled with the perspective that fifty years can provide.
Leplae's minimalist drawing style suits both his semi-centennial perspective and his scientific bent. Unimportant details are evacuated to focus on the visually and personally salient. Like a scientific diagram turned to narrative purposes, his drawings are symbolic without being specifically flat, warmly shaded with colored pencils. Figures are almost always featureless, distinguished by coloration, clothing, and a bare number of personal characteristics. Luco is always recognizable by a darker skin tone, an ever-present red cap (which leaps from his skull in moments of surprise, panic, etc.), and is often shirtless and barefoot (Luco, it is explained in one story, entertains the notion that he is very much like Tarzan).
There is just enough crude linear perspective to supply necessary information about location, spatial relationships, and so forth. In the most strictly schematic sequences, backgrounds often disappear as characters interact with diagramatically rendered, but still quite solid, objects. The visual description of Luco's distillation still, for example, is scientifically instructive, but functions primarily as a narrative tableau. The mechanical details of aircraft and the machine-like anatomy of insects are faithfully rendered in a similarly precise (but unburdened) manner.
Leplae's minimalism has a flexible membrane, stretching to admit the telling detail when necessary. In "Uncle Charly's Nose," Luco's uncle has a distinctive nose that contrasts strangely with the bald, ovoid profiles of the book's other characters. Luco's parents explain the difference, frankly recounting Uncle Charly's roguish attempt to burn down his neighbor's crops and the subsequent disfigurement he suffered upon a barbed-wire fence. In another story, Luco's bud-like hand becomes semi-realistic in close-up. Luco even sprouts eyes to express extreme panic during an aerial bombardment.
In "The Ice Storm," Luco and his mother walk carefully to a tutor's house in the wake of an ice storm. Luco's neighborhood has become crystalline, the streets frozen over into sheets of hazardous black ice. Rather than use typical comics conventions (diagonal lines = reflective surfaces), Leplae draws his streets as dark mirrors, and casts plunging reflections beneath each standing figure. Here, the general meets the specific in a surreal moment, as the convincing reflections enforce the three-dimensional reality of Leplae's diagrammatic figures and their world. Ironically, the very scientific principles of linear perspective impose the accent of naturalism upon Leplae's abstracted schema. In this case, the unsettling effect reinforces both the unusual nature of the frozen environment and the anxiety that dominates this particular story.
Dialogue similarly stretches to balance Leplae's expository needs with characterization.
Characters constantly explain things, explicating relationships, personal histories,
and other details. In "The Ice Storm," Luco
offers a running commentary as he walks carefully down the street with his mother:
"We are at DeFrey Avenue. So we are about half way to my teacher's apartment...
We still have to Climb Boetendall Avenue. It must be one of the steepest streets of
Brussels. Do you think that you can make it?" "I hope so," his mother replies.
The expository dialogue creates a distancing effect, but the information is always relevant
to the events at hand and the characters retain personality and integrity. Leplae's dialogue
resembles Mark Beyer's in this regard.
These overlapping formal dualities are appropriate to Leplae's themes. The book is divided into the two sections indicated by the title, "Wartime" and "Playtime," but the two are never entirely distinct. In fact, two stories filed under "Playtime" online are included with the book's "Wartime" stories. The "Wartime" stories do relate more directly to military events of the German occupation and subsequent Allied bombardment, but are united more strongly by a consistent tone. Each ends with a sense of anxiety, of disaster narrowly averted, or of horror just witnessed. The humorous embarrassment of "Playtime" becomes mortal fear and haunting disquietude during "Wartime." Appropriately enough, the book's unsettling themes are introduced in the short that opens "Playtime" (and the book): Luc observes a wasp caught in a spider's web. At first despairing that the trapped wasp will destroy the spider's perfect web, he marvels as the tiny spider quickly envelops the wasp in a cocoon. Luco is then horrified at the sudden appearance of a larger spider, which repeats the routine, entangling the smaller spider and the captured wasp in another cocoon. "How awful!" Luc thinks. "It went so fast! Those two spiders acted exactly in the same way, like two identical mechanical toys." In the next and final panel: "This is terrible! I have never seen anything like that in my life! Is our world as bad as that?" The end.
This incident and the warfare that surround him raise questions about science, the source of much of Luco's play. Nature can seem terrible, particularly when nature acts mechanically; meanwhile mechanized human armies battle over Brussels.
In "The Sculpture," Luco is trapped in plaster casts (his father is a sculptor
1) during an air raid.
His family scrambles into the ever-present dug-out bomb shelter; Luco is exposed as American planes drop bombs directly
overhead. "Don't be afraid," his father tells him. "The planes dropped the bombs on top of our heads.
This means that they will not hit us, as they move at the same velocity as the planes." Luco's father was correct,
but the accuracy of science fails to neutralize the boy's terror. In another story, Luco and his mother can only watch as
two small fishing boats are destroyed by a mine. "I am cold," says his mother. "Let us go back to the hotel!" "OK," says Luco.
"I want to leave this place too." In "The Lightning," one character admires the
aesthetic qualities of a British airplane, even as its appearance sends Luco into a mortal panic.
As depicted, Leplae's childhood was guided by tolerant, artistic parents, who protected his person but
did not shelter Luco from true stories or from the consequences of life (nor could they, under the circumstances).
His curiosity, creativity and inventiveness were consistently encouraged. Based upon his experiences,
Leplae commenced a career in physics conscious of the ways that indifferent science could be both stimulating and
inhumane in the application. Forced into retirement, it is unclear why he chose comics as the medium in which to
preserve his memories. Tintin figures into one of Leplae's stories and may have been an inspiration.
Regardless, Leplae invented a kind of comic book. He built a functional structure designed to conduct memory
through the accumulation of those telling details that remained prominent from the vantage point of age. The
jury-rigged contraption occasionally shows its seams, but the principles are sound and the experiment works.
1 Leplae's
website
reveals that Luc's father Charles Leplae
completed the sculpture of Luc and later sculpted a medal depicting the statue in relief.
This medal was given as a trophy to Stolichnaya vodka at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.
A line-art depiction of the medal was added to the Stolichnaya label design;
thus, every bottle of Stolichnaya vodka carries a small, simplified image of Luc Leplae.
