The old crackers
| Comic | |
|---|---|
| title | The old crackers |
| Original title | Les Vieux Fourneaux |
| author | Wilfrid Lupano |
| Illustrator | Paul Cauuet |
| publishing company | Dargaud |
| First publication | April 2014 - ... |
| expenditure | 5 (6 planned) |
The old crackers ( French. Les Vieux Fourneaux ) is a multi-part French comic series by Wilfrid Lupano ( author ) and Paul Cauuet ( draftsman ). The series won the 2015 Angoulême Comics Festival Audience Award .
action
Volume 1: The Remaining ( Ceux qui restent )
Pierrot, Mimile and Antoine are three French people who have already passed 70. They have been friends since childhood. The three have rebelled against the authorities all their lives and still have a revolutionary attitude towards everything they see as the establishment . When Antoine learns that his late wife has cheated on him with the boss of his company, he decides to commit a crime out of passion: he wants to go to Tuscany to murder the company tycoon. His granddaughter Sophie and friends follow him to stop him.
In Tuscany arrived, Antoine finds his former boss as one of Alzheimer diseased Tattergreis before and not contrives to do him harm. The mentally deranged gives the granddaughter the code for an illegal offshore account for 90 million euros.
Volume 2: Bonny and Pierrot ( Bonny and Pierrot )
Sophie anonymously sends Pierrot a chunk of money that she has withdrawn from the corporate tycoon's illegal account. She puts the name of a lover of Pierrot under the letter, which leads to the fact that he begins a search for the woman who almost brings him to despair. The story makes excursions into the past, with the protests against the Algerian war and Papon being discussed. Pierrot was also involved in a bank robbery with his Bonnie and Clyde- style lover . Sophie regrets her action and is forced to take a drastic action: She commits an anarchist joke on a shareholders' meeting, where she sets off a flour bomb. For the bomb, she adapted a so-called "sheep cannon" built by three boys who learned it from the Internet.
Volume 3: The One Who Goes ( Celui qui part )
The third volume essentially deals with Mimile, who spent part of his life in the Pacific, where he went on a treasure hunt. He eventually found treasure there, but his greed for money and adventure resulted in a good friend being badly mutilated. Sophie learns of a secret from the youth of the three protagonists that they would have preferred to keep to themselves: In their youth they ruined a girl's life through bullying , vicious pranks and character assassination . The girl's mother allegedly had a love affair with a German soldier during the German occupation and Pierrot, Mimile and Antoine, who later saw themselves as mouthpieces for the oppressed, began to destroy the daughter's life.
At the same time, one learns that Pierrot and two other members of his anarchist collective have campaigned against the dying of bees, with an action that was inspired by Sophie's joke on the shareholders' meeting from Volume 2. However, they were caught by the police and subsequently have to fear losing the base of their collective.
Volume 4: The Sorceress ( La Magicienne )
In the fourth volume, Antoine's granddaughter, Sophie, takes center stage. In addition to her employment as a puppeteer in her traveling theater, Der Wolf im Slip , she looks after her daughter as a single mother, with the support of Antoine. When the pharmaceutical company Garan-Servier wanted to expand its branch in its rural hometown, which would create new jobs in the structurally weak region, eggs of the rare great sawhorse (called "jagged sorceress" in French) were found on the planned building site. Environmental activists immediately occupy the country to prevent expansion. Antoine, who worries about his granddaughter's future if Garan-Servier should move away from the region, tries to prevent the protest. His friend Pierrot, however, has a completely different opinion and travels with a group of aged anarchists from Paris to support the resistance. Meanwhile, Sophie discovers a secret about her father and unintentionally falls in love with the manager of the activist camp, who runs organic farming on a neighboring estate.
Volume 5: Ready for Asylum ( Bons pour l'asile )
The action takes place again in Paris. Pierrot takes part in an anarchist action again and ends up at the police station. There he meets a black French woman whom he has brought off the wrong track as a social worker. The fact that she works as a police officer now shocks him a little. Antoine finds his son and is forced by Sophie to spend time with him and his granddaughter. Both come a little closer. Mimile wants to go to a France-Australia rugby match but is struggling to convince his friends to come with him. These three stories are intertwined with the social management of the migration issue. At the rugby match, Mimile finally protested in front of an audience of millions against the Australian internment camps for refugees on Nauru by showing his bare bottom. He recites the fifth line of the national anthem of Nauru in the original. For the other old crackers and anarchists, he becomes a hero.
Release history
In France, five albums of the comic have been published by Dargaud so far . The author Wilfrid Lupano is currently planning to close the series with six volumes, but has not yet finalized it.
- Ceux qui restent , 11 Apr 2014, ISBN 978-2-505-01993-0
- Bonny and Pierrot , Oct. 24, 2014, ISBN 978-2-505-06163-2
- Celui qui part , Nov. 13, 2015, ISBN 978-2-505-06352-0
- La Magicienne , 10 Nov 2017, ISBN 978-2-505-06542-5
- Bons pour l'asile , 9 Nov 2018, ISBN 978-2-505-07141-9
The series is published in German by Splitter Verlag .
- The remainder , from August 2015, ISBN 978-3-95839-147-5
- Bonny and Pierrot , December 2015, ISBN 978-3-95839-148-2
- The One Who Goes , February 2016, ISBN 978-3-95839-149-9
- The Sorceress , October 2017, ISBN 978-3-95839-150-5
- Ready for Asylum , January 2019, ISBN 978-3-96219-216-7
reception
The series won the audience award at the Angoulême comic festival in 2015. With over 500,000 copies sold in France, Die alten Knacker was also a sales success for Dargaud. Andreas Platthaus praised the humor, the precision of the setting, the comic situations and the accuracy of the decorations.
Web links
- Information and excerpt from Splitter Verlag
- Dargaud's website about the series (French)
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Note in volume 4, p. 9
- ↑ A cocktail of comics and graphic novels - review of volume 4 and interview with Wilfrid Lupano in the show Corso des Deutschlandfunk .
- ^ Les Vieux fourneaux , véritable phenomène de librairie. Dargaud.com, January 11, 2016, accessed June 4, 2016 (French).
- ↑ Crisp these old crackers - criticism in the FAZ .