158 - Cosey

Cosey COSEY JONATHAN Uncle Howard Is Back (Vol. 10), Le Lombard 1985 Original cover design. Kate’s face was drawn on a patch affixed to the original. Signed. Graphite and gouache on paper 18.2 × 20 cm (7.17 × 7.87 in.) Cosey has always loved to experiment. In the mid-1970s, as the comic book press was collapsing, he sensed that comics were entering a new era. Gone were the serialized stories, an economic model that had thrived for a century. Behind creators like Hugo Pratt and Pierre Christin, “Dad’s comics” had run their course. Without disavowing his past work, Cosey proposed a new narrative format to Le Lombard, which the Brussels-based publisher accepted only reluctantly. We know that *In Search of Peter Pan* would become one of the defining moments of the author’s career. The lesson was well learned: his subsequent graphic novels would no longer be published by Lombard, but by Dupuis, in a collection practically tailor-made for him: *Aire Libre*. At the same time, the Jonathan series would take a crucial turn: Jonathan met an American woman, Kate, in an album that earned its author an award at Angoulême. This is an opportunity for Cosey to offer his readers a thriller in which, for the first time, the hero leaves his mountains to travel to the U.S., as illustrated by the cover art for this tenth album. Didier Pasamonik Yellow cabs, graffiti on brick walls, fire escapes, Phil Dixfield—the detective straight out of a James Ellroy novel—and, of course, Kate, were all reasons enough for Jonathan to stray from the Tibetan trails for a while. After nine albums set in the Himalayas, I drew inspiration from two trips to the Land of Mickey. Cosey