Les trembles, Thomas Merceron’s 2024 release from French publisher Quintal, is a beguiling object: a handsome black hardcover with holographic detailing that largely refuses to indicate anything about its contents. In terms of presentation, it revels in its own manufactured mystery: the front and back cover each sport a single panel excerpted from the comic—both of them depicting the protagonist through a prism of distancing, a reflection on the puddle in one, standing on the balcony viewed through a glass door in the other—but in lieu of any synopsis, any concrete information, the surrounding text is all surface detail: the title, the name of the author and publisher, the ISBN, the MSRP. Yet that these details are all given a level playing field—the same unmissably large type, italicized and elongated—is perhaps the first indication of what the cartoonist Merceron is trying to tell us.
Throughout the book, which is entirely wordless, Merceron presents his reader with digressions of varying existential scope, the march of a colony of ants given the same narrative heft, the same significance, as a massive mountain in the midst of an avalanche. These digressions are, in fact, quite charming, and most impressive in their studies of light and shadow; where the protagonist has idly thrown a rock, the cartoonist zooms closely into the earth and manages to give the folds and crevices of the ground striking figurative depth. Of note in these digressions is the one textural flourish that Merceron uses to depart from his otherwise-monotextural reality in the form of a pointillist spray effect: when we assume the viewpoint of an ant, it will be used as a dimming aura on the outskirt of ‘our’ field of vision; when we follow a fly trying to enter the protagonist’s apartment, it will denote the opacity of the windowpane. The latter, here, is particularly endearing: as we adopt the fly’s perspective—indicated through a fragmented hexagonal pattern overlaid on the art—the protagonist and furniture are reduced to that same pointillism, yet the food on his table is depicted with sharp clarity, creating an effective shorthand for perceptual focus. It’s easy, during these sequences, to think of the Chinese cartoonist Woshibai and his effort to reject narrative drama and present a world of pure ambiance.
These digressions are one more overt tool that Merceron employs in the interest of emotional distancing. Another is more ingrained, more inherent to his style: In his linework, Merceron is distinctly reminiscent of Yokoyama Yūichi – his inks are slick, pointedly-cool, hardly ever varying in weight, with a hefty focus on energy and movement lines. Note, too, the designs, how Merceron’s world appears to be populated entirely by people who wear sharply-angled sunglasses. If that’s not enough, the opening ‘movement’ of the work—in which the protagonist, following a meeting at a café, takes the metro, then the bus, to the open countryside, extensively depicting this liminal non-communal circumstance of transit—appears almost a direct riff on Yokoyama’s own Travel, a work that is inextricable from the discussion of alienated distance.
And yet, these mechanisms of distancing on which the book is premised turn out, over time, to be its biggest enemy. The digressions, which initially appear to be an act of hyper-contextualization in the interest of de-centering a human-dramatic narrative, take on a different meaning: as Merceron peppers the occasional glimpse of the protagonist’s main emotional preoccupation (a former lover, whether dead or otherwise absent), these otherwise-striking-on-their-own portrayals of nature are relegated into a mere mirror-image-writ-large of the protagonist’s physical and emotional state. The running water of the kitchen sink, which Merceron initially depicts as zoomed-in molecules, reminds him of an excursion to the beach; the avalanche is paralleled with the protagonist’s own nicotine-withdrawal tremors, prompting him to take out his pack of cigarettes and smoke as he ponders his beloved. That Merceron chooses the conceit of wordlessness, of course, does not help, as it forces him to rely on gesture and shorthand. For instance, it is only because his protagonist is a man and the love interest is a woman that they scan as inherently romantic at all. Neither their personalities nor their relationship are given any defining characteristics, any unique voice, indeed anything for the reader to latch onto besides a stereotypical perception and the authorial fear that anything other than “man + woman” might scan as a powerful enough love-in-absence to be worth artistic attention.
At the end of the comic, the protagonist takes a shower, and, among the steam, Merceron zooms out into space to show planets orbiting, apathetically, around the sun flaring. When the narrative comes back to Earth, the protagonist lies down in bed; he falls asleep and sees, once again, his beloved, as well as the galaxies far away. She, like them, is out of his reach; she, like them, is radiant beyond compare. He opens his eyes, his star-filled eyes: it is time for a new day, though whether it brings with it new opportunities or merely regurgitated miseries is open, as ever, to question.
Though Les trembles is eminently more substantial, at three times the length and two times the page size, I cannot help but think about a similarly frustrating comic, Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday: handsome cartooning that belies a profound lack of emotional truth; work that might be perhaps more tolerable in the broader context of an anthology but which fails to hold up its weight in isolation.
On his website, Merceron says of his protagonist, “He then becomes every element in existence. He both is in the world, and is the world” (from French, translation my own). This is a charming sentiment on its face, but only so long as one does not stop to ask why; the answer is because the work so lacks—so refuses—particularity that it has no choice but to “become every element in existence.” It is emotional only insofar as a factory conveyor belt is emotional: if it’s been long enough since its last lubrication, we can bring ourselves to imagine that it does not creak but weeps for some lost Laura.
The beauty of longing, from an emotional standpoint, is that it contains other feelings within it: it is love, and aspiration, and absence, and desperation, all in more-or-less equal measure. But, with Les trembles, Thomas Merceron projects this longing onto the unsuspecting impertinent, making the error of conflating ‘all-encompassing,’ looking inward, with ‘all-defining,’ forced outward. This is, granted, an easy and alluring error to make, but nonetheless a frustrating one to witness. What is the point of beauty if we can only see ourselves in it? What is the point of this great big world, if we can only bring ourselves to view it as a mirror?
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