Ordinary Victories

http://www.graphicnovelreview.com/scans/georgeisaneurotic.jpg
anyone read this, Manu Larcenet’s Eisner-nominated Ordinary Victories, any good? too short?

I've read first three books of the series, it's quite good. I think that panel is from the first book, have they translated the other two as well? Because to me the first book's ending felt a bit too easy and neat, but thankfully the second book kinda undermined that. The story sometimes gets a bit too angsty and emo, but I like how Larcenet ties bigger questions of life, death, politics, art, etc. into the standard "slices of life of a man with personal issues" type of story. So it's well worth reading.

And I think the series is still ongoing, or at least the third book ended with a bit of a cliffhanger. So it's not really too short.

's good. I've read the readily available NBM trade which I took to be the work in toto, readily accepting the un easy lack of a easy and clean resolution as satisfying in its own way. Though I'm fully prepared to accept a continuation, should that be the case.

un easy lack of a easy

Ah, awkward grammar! Huzzah!

Apparently a fourth book has come out in France this year, but they haven't translated it to Finnish yet.

I think the second book is the best out of the three I've read. The bits about the coworkers of the main character's father at the dockyard are very well done, and it's also subject that's rarely explored in comics.

I plan on buying the first two books (they've been translated to English) but I just worry that I will be done reading both of them in less than 3 hours.

uh, you should be done in less than an hour.

well, I got 'From Hell' for xmas and that should be a long read.

In this style, I like even better 'Monsieur Jean' but I don't know if it's translated into other languages.

Monsieur Jean is good indeed. It's more humorous and less ponderous than Ordinary Victories, and like you said probably even better. Most of it has been translated to Finnish, and I think there's some English collection too..?

I think there's some English collection too..?

Two, actually.

ALSO: HAUNTED by half of the "Jean" team, Phillipe Dupuy, is splendid stuff. Kinda like a breezier version of Breandan McCarthy's SOLO issue, gentler and less inclined to set off formal fireworks on every page, but really nifty.

A couple of the M. Jean shorts have been in Drawn & Quarterly's big tall anthologies, and they did a small hardcover compiling the first three books under the title Get A Life (with an accompanying translation of Journal d'un Album). It's a really frustrating format, that doesn't serve the material well.

So it's not in B4 page size like the original comics?

It's slightly smaller than US comic size, as opposed to the A4-ish of Euro hardcovers -- but more than that, the three books rammed together DON'T make a graphic novel, and I think would have worked better as three slim albums, each playing on a loose theme

I think the standard Euro comic book (or "album", as we call them here) size is bigger than A4, which is why I said B4, though I'm not sure if that's the correct size... I wouldn't want to read Monsieur Jean in shrunk size, as the line is pretty delicate in it already. I once saw an English-language Tintin book where three Tintin albums had been collected and shrunk to US comic size, and it looked awful.

I think the first three Monsieur Jean books consist of various "short stories", whereas the latter books all have one long 50-page story per book. So at least collecting the vignettes makes more sense than collecting the later books into one edition.

I've been reading Mr. Jean in a softcover twofer edition. I'm guessing A4 format

or at least the 4 first volumes

Btw, have Lewis Trondheim's "Lapinot" comics been translated to English? That's my favourite recent French series besides Monsieur Jean and Cristophe Blain's "Isaac le Pirate".

Lapinot is such a random series! I always tell myself the books are pleasant but nothing special and thens omehow I've ended up buying them all.

I like how the series takes turns between the weird historical adventures and the more mundane stories set in the present day. Even the books where nothing special happens are fun to read, and I guess nothing special happening is exactly the point.

"Ordinary Victories" is pretty good, though at times it tires me with its feelings of importance and with its morality (I'm thinking about the whole "nice-old-man-turns-out-to-be-argelian-nazi!" thing).

I think the one I like the most is "Little Nothings", by Trondheim, but I haven't read the Monsieur Jean books yet.

yeah "Combat Ordinaire" is somewhat self-righteous and even pompous for such a supposedly low-key slice-of-life series. "Monsieur Jean" OTOH first comes across as a light series of vignettes but gets you in a much more subtle way

The Algerian veteran thing was indeed a bit too much, and I the series does get a bit pompous at times... But I did like some of the more "important" themes, like the workers at the dockyard and their working-class issues, or the episode where the protagonist meets his photographer hero, and he turns out to be an egotist prick. I agree that Monsieur Jean handles similar themes in a more subtle and often better ways though.