Portrait of a Drunk

Guy is a pirate. And a boozehound, a liar, a lazybones, a thief and a murderer. We follow his exploits as he staggers through life, and some of his victims observe him from the afterlife. An unreliable and workshy shipwright, he insults his apprentice, robs a deceased noblewoman, has no qualms about engaging in torture and loses himself in alcoholic oblivion. At the end of the book he is just as immoral as he was at the start.

This first collaboration between Olivier Schrauwen and French duo Ruppert & Mulot results in visual fireworks, featuring Schrauwen’s signature figures and colours as well as the breathtaking backdrops of Ruppert & Mulot, who were also responsible for the bulk of the script. The nervous laughter and revulsion aroused by the pathetic protagonist result in great black humour and shame on his part. Guy’s personality was consumed by his alcoholism long ago, so he is now little more than a kind of universal drunkard. And yet the authors manage to put the reader in his shoes – in part by presenting the secondary characters as faceless figures. This psychedelic story does an excellent job of killing off the myth of the heroic pirate once and for all.