Haunted

AUTHOR: Dupuy, Philippe

ARTIST: Philippe Dupuy (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Cornélius (French); Drawn and Quarterly (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Hanté, 2005 (English translation, 2008)

Publication History

Hanté, the original French version of Haunted, was published in 2005 by the French alternative graphic novel publisher Cornélius, which had published New-York: Carnets (1996), created by Philippe Dupuy with Charles Berberian, chronicling their trip to the city. The cover of Hanté used a drawing of Dupuy wearing a white jogging suit and running through a tangle of arteries and tendons. In 2006, Dupuy received a nomination for the Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Hanté was the first graphic novel that Dupuy published without the collaboration of Berberian. Since forming his partnership with Berberian, Dupuy had worked independently only once before. In 1994, addressing issues related to their work and revealing aspects of their personal lives, each author wrote sections of Un Journal d’un album; this technique was in sharp contrast to their usual working method of jointly creating all aspects of a text.

In 2008, Haunted, the English version, translated by Helge Dascher, was published by the Canadian publishing house Drawn and Quarterly. This version used a different cover, featuring the head of Dupuy with a brain and blood vessels emerging from the back. Drawn and Quarterly has also published English versions of Le Journal d’un album entitled Maybe Later (2006) and a collection of the Monsieur Jean stories entitled Get a Life (2006). Haunted is also available through Drawn and Quarterly as an e-book.

Plot

In Haunted, Dupuy explores his own mind and psyche. As he jogs, his mind takes him into a fantasy world, where he encounters a diverse group of characters. Several times, the trip through his mind leads to interpolated stories in which he does not participate with characters. Dupuy begins his graphic novel with a dream he has had about paintings of faces with no eyes. He follows this with the first “Run Movie 1—Jogging” in which he is jogging, explaining that with each stride the jogger has a thought. This leads to the first story about a dog who chews off his leg when he is caught in a leg-hold trap. The dog struggles to survive but dies. A bird discovers the carcass and plucks out an eye.

The second “Run Movie 2—Hands” recounts another incident in which a missing body part is featured as he recalls his horror at seeing a boy in his class who had no hands. Dupuy returns to stories dealing with loss of body parts in two of the later stories, “Labyrinth” and “Forest Friends.” In “Labyrinth,” a creature with a human body and an animal head is emasculated by worms or maggots and experiences horror, rage, and finally, despair, ending in suicide. The plot of “Forest Friends” is more complex. The forest friends are a group of male buddies. One of the group loses his arm; his friends wrestle with the problem of commitment, of “being there” for someone, and of trying to understand someone else’s pain.

Between “Hands” and “Labyrinth,” Dupuy includes five stories. In “The dReam” he portrays himself watching a catastrophe from his window, failing to call for help since he does not know the phone number. In “The Museum,” as he runs, his mind takes him into a museum where he talks with a dog about having a private place and about creativity. “Empty” deals with an artist named Hamfist who attempts to discover the meaning of empty space. In “The Old Lady and the Turtle,” the jogging Dupuy’s mind creates an old woman who has a turtle companion and helps him explore his inner self. In “The Rats,” Dupuy is remodeling a house, and rats come out of the structure and invade his body; he vomits them, but they return in his dreams. He eventually leaves the house.

Between “Labyrinth” and “Forest Friends,” the jogging Dupuy’s mind involves him in a conversation with his deceased mother, whom he meets while jogging in “Mom,” and to an encounter with a sort of renaissance-man duck who has collected so many objects and learned so much that he has lost himself and is trying to find himself. There are two stories after “Forest Friends,” “Lucha Libre” and “The Finish Line.” In “Lucha Libre,” a wrestler defeats all challengers and brags about his lack of compassion and his violence. Then a female wrestler with whom he is in love appears to challenge him and renders him helpless. The final story, “The Finish Line,” returns to Dupuy jogging and thinking about knowing when to stop, to not cross the line between everyday reality and the world of the mind. The final scene shows Dupuy descended into the chasm of his mind, residing with his cartoon characters.

Characters

•Philippe Dupuy, the author, appears as the main character in most of the stories.

•A dog, who is caught in a leg hold trap, chews off his leg.

•A boy without hands successfully performs a variety of tasks but inspires horror in a twelve-year-old Dupuy.

•A dog, who is a museum guard, guides Dupuy through his own museum or mind.

•Hamfist is an artist in search of emptiness.

•An old lady guides Dupuy on a search for self.

•Escarole is the old lady’s turtle.

•A male creature with a human body and an animal head rejoices in being alive. He enters a labyrinth, is emasculated, becomes desperate, murders a couple engaged in sex, and commits suicide by running into a wall.

•Dupuy’s mother, who is dead, jogs with him to discuss what is important in life and how to live.

•A duck, a collector of everything, has tried to learn every skill and all the information available in the world. He has realized that he has lost himself.

•A group of forest friends is composed of a reindeer, a rabbit, a creature who may be a beaver, and a creature who appears to be a wolf. The wolf has lost his arm. The friends fail to give the wolf the support he needs; he goes to the city. The friends philosophize and worry about him. The wolf returns, and they drink a toast to his arm.

•A male Lucha Libre wrestler sporting an “M” on his mask, brags that he is the murderer, the minotaur. He defeats all challengers.

•A female Lucha Libre wrestler is the downfall of the Lucha Libre wrestler M. She challenges him, and he is unable to fight her.

Artistic Style

In Haunted, Dupuy uses a style of drawing that contrasts sharply with that of the works done in collaboration with Berberian. The motif of running, of hurrying along, is reflected in his characters, which have much in common with sketchbook characters or images doodled on the margins of a page. They convey a sense of quickness, of fleeting time, and of the momentariness of life. There is no time for elaborate, detailed depiction. The entire graphic novel is done in black and white. The themes of transparency, weakness, inability, and emptiness are portrayed by Dupuy’s use of characters drawn without color or substance. The drawings of a cross section of his body and the images of him, and often other characters (such as the old woman or the forest friends), either within his own organs or in a hole that has suddenly opened reinforce the motif of his run through his own mind.

Dupuy uses a wide variety of formats, ranging from full-page layouts to unframed multi-images per page and series of panels on a page. In addition, he uses combinations of framed and unframed drawings. This technique adds to his theme of running, of moving quickly, and of searching for himself and the meaning of living. His use of dialogue and author or character commentary is varied from story to story. The text begins and ends with Dupuy addressing himself or the implied reader with a commentary on running. Three of the stories— “The Dog,” “The Rats,” and “Labyrinth”—rely totally on drawings to convey meaning; there is neither dialogue nor commentary. “Empty” and “Forest Friends” use dialogue bubbles almost exclusively; Dupuy does not appear as a character in either of these stories.

In “Lucha Libre,” Dupuy relies almost exclusively on the drawings in the first half of the story, then he adds character commentary and eventually ends with a dialogue bubble when the girl speaks to the wrestler. In “Hands” and “The dReam,” only author commentary accompanies the drawings. In “The Museum,” “Mom,” and “The Duck,” Dupuy uses a combination of dialogue bubbles and author or character commentary. In “The Museum” the preponderance of the written text is the conversation between the dog and Dupuy; however, when he recalls the pictures he made as a child, Dupuy switches to author commentary. “Mom” is framed in author commentary, as Dupuy remarks when he is running alone. When Mom is present he uses bubbles. “The Duck” uses dialogue bubbles primarily but contains some commentary by the duck. This mixing of pictorial and text formats enhances the sense of Haunted being a compilation of thoughts both connected and unconnected that run through Dupuy’s mind as he jogs.

Themes

Dupuy explores the effects of loss or lack of body parts, of solitude and its resulting loneliness and introspection, and of interpersonal relationships and the creation of self. With the dog that self-mutilates to free itself from the trap, the boy without hands, the emasculated fantasy creature, and the forest friend who has lost his arm, Dupuy examines the gamut of outcomes of amputation. Only the boy truly succeeds in adjusting to his disability. Although the dog struggles desperately to survive, it dies. Emasculation plunges the fantasy creature into an intense despair, resulting in suicide. The forest friend experiences a lesser degree of despair and resigns himself to the loss of his arm.

The cartoons of the boy with no hands and of the forest friend also address the problems associated with interaction with others. Lacking hands, the boy is perceived as different. His handicap isolates him from other people. No matter how much he overcomes his handicap, he always remains other than normal. In “Forest Friends,” Dupuy concentrates more on the reaction of the friends than on that of the friend who has experienced the loss. The friends want to help, but they do not know how to do so. During the period of absence of the injured friend, they vacillate between worrying about him and going on with their lives. Dupuy portrays strongly the fact that each individual remains alone, as the friends discover and accept the fact that they cannot really share in either the emotional or physical pain of their friend. For Dupuy, each individual is a unique entity surrounded by solitude, or the empty space, whose meaning Hamfist attempts to discover in “Empty.”

As Dupuy runs through the pages of his graphic novel, he penetrates deeper into his own mind and even in to his subconscious. His encounters with the dog in the museum, the old lady with the turtle, his mother, and the collector duck all provide opportunities to explore life, its meaning, and the finding or creation of one’s true self. The dog in the museum and the old lady point out the creative possibilities of the mind. During his brief run with his mother, he considers the need to distinguish and preserve the important and meaningful events and aspects of life while letting go of the rest. The discussion between Dupuy and the collector duck develops the same theme.

Impact

Haunted has enlarged the scope of Dupuy’s career as a graphic novelist. Writing Haunted, he experimented with a different writing style, a different approach to creating a graphic novel, and even the concept of what constitutes a graphic novel. Dupuy was actually running when he started writing Haunted. Thus, the work emanated from thoughts and observations that he hurriedly sketched and wrote on small notepads while sitting in cafés in Paris.

In addition, Haunted has opened a new direction for the team of Berberian and Dupuy. The long-running Monsieur Jean had confined them to presenting their characters and story line in a certain way, because readers expect certain traits and elements in Monsieur Jean. Both Dupuy and Berberian have stated in interviews that they feel what Dupuy did in Haunted is something they want to incorporate into their collaborative work. Although they are aware that many readers will be upset to see the Monsieur Jean stories taking a new direction, they are eager to use the innovations and ideas that Dupuy developed in Haunted as a springboard to give Monsieur Jean a new direction and attract new readers.

Further Reading

Abouet, Marguerite. Aya (2007-2009).

Delisle, Guy. Burma Chronicles (2008).

Dupuy, Philippe, and Charles Berberian. Get a Life (2006).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Maybe Later (2006).

Bibliography

Dauncey, Hugh, ed. French Popular Culture: An Introduction. London: Arnold, 2003.

Forsdick, Charles, Laurence Grove, and Libbie McQuillan, eds. The Francophone Bande Dessinée. New York: Rodopi, 2005.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.