Take a break with a graphic novel!

To escape after your exams, here's a selection of comics that combine quality drawing and script!

Anlor. Ducoudray, Aurélien. Amère Russie. Charnay-lès-Mâcon : Bamboo édition. 2015.

In the mid-1990s, Ekaterina tries to survive by selling pirated DVDs in the Moscow underground. She has no news of her son, a soldier on operations in Chechnya. One day, she reads Volodia's name on a list of prisoners.

• Bablet, Mathieu. Carbone & Silicium. Roubaix : Ankama éditions. 2020.

2046. The latest offspring of the Tomorrow Foundation laboratories, Carbone and Silicium are the prototypes of a new generation of robots designed to care for the ageing human population. Raised in a protective cocoon, eager to discover the outside world, they are eventually separated during an escape attempt. They then each conduct their own experiments and struggle, over several centuries, to find their place on a planet on its last legs, where climate catastrophes and political and human upheavals follow one another.

• Gomont, Pierre-Henry. Pereira prétend. Paris : Sarbacane. 2016.

Lisbon, Portugal, at the height of the Salazarist dictatorship, late July 1938. In a city shrouded in a ‘shroud of heat’, an ageing journalist, Doutor Pereira, widower, obese, with a heart condition and tormented, has been writing the cultural page of the very conservative daily Lisboa every day for over thirty years. Into this sleepy life, a certain Francesco Monteiro Rossi bursts... and, quite unexpectedly, Pereira hires him. But instead of writing the wise obituaries that Pereira had commissioned, the young freelancer handed him eulogies, as sulphurous as they were unpublishable, of Lorca and Mayakovsky, avowed enemies of the fascist regime.

• Hubert. Zanzim. Peau d’homme. Grenoble : Glénat. 2020.

In Renaissance Italy, Bianca, a young lady from a good family, is old enough to get married. Her parents find her a fiancé to their liking: Giovanni, a rich merchant, young and pleasant. The marriage seems to be going well, although Bianca cannot hide her disappointment at having to marry a man she knows nothing about. But that was without knowing the secret that the women of her family have been keeping for generations: a ‘man's skin’! By putting it on, Bianca becomes Lorenzo, with all the attributes of a young man of astonishing beauty. She can now visit the world of men incognito and get to know her fiancé in his natural environment. But in her man's skin, Bianca frees herself from the limits imposed on women and discovers love and sexuality.

• Bravo, Émile. Spirou, l’espoir malgré tout. 1. Un mauvais départ. Marcinelle : Dupuis. 2018.

January 1940. A particularly harsh winter has fallen on Brussels. While everyone waits with apprehension for the imminent arrival of war, Fantasio has enlisted in the Belgian army. In the fortress of Ében-Émael, he is impatient for battle and has no doubt that the French and British armies will crush the German army... As for Spirou, he is still a bellboy and continues to live as normally as possible. His meeting with Felix, a German Jewish painter whose work the Nazis have deemed ‘degenerate’, and Felka, his wife, will introduce him to the ‘Jewish question’ and the complexity of the international situation.

• Cruchaudet, Chloé. Céleste . Première partie . « Bien sûr, Monsieur Proust ». Paris Toulon : Éditions Soleil. 2022.

Using multiple sources, Chloé Cruchaudet weaves a devoted and passionate portrait of Céleste Albaret, Marcel Proust's governess and sometimes secretary until his death in 1922. She reveals their bond, the writer in all his asperities, the atmosphere of an era and the background to the construction of a fiction. The real world and the ghostly world intertwine in this sublime diptych.