Best known for his collage-style images of celebrities (Rock Dreams) and a handful of classic record covers (David Bowie's Diamond Dogs and The Rolling Stones' It's Only Rock 'N' Roll), the Belgian painter, illustrator and cartoonist Guy Peellaert created two major graphic novels in the 1960s.
Originally serialized in the satirical French magazine Hara-Kiri and subsequently released as a very early adult graphic novel by the legendary French comics publisher Eric Losfeld, The Adventures of Jodelle (written by Pierre Bartier) melded the bold compositional skills of a top pop-art-era draftsman with a unique sensitivity to the comics medium.
Jodelle, a satirical spy adventure set in an Asterix-style anachronistic Caesar-epoch fantasy Rome featuring both billboards and vampires, was published in English in 1967 by Grove Press, whose legendary editor-in-chief Richard Seaver also provided the translation.
Jodelle is restored and re-colored digitally to improve on the original's sometimes shaky color separations, as well as re-translated and re-lettered, and features a major analytical/contextual essay by the French art and comics critic and historian Pierre Sterckx (Tintin Schizo; René Magritte: The Empire of Images) discussing the work and its historical context - plus a huge selection of never-before-seen archival art reproductions, sketches, photographs, etc. It is printed as a lush, oversized hardcover, in a way that highlights the eye-popping, psychedelic color.
