Usually I don’t participate in these “invitation chains” nor I really like those “ultimate” lists but Darko Macan found a slightly different take on subject, posting about – and I quote him -” the classic BD albums that blew my mind (in a good way) at one point or another”. I commented quickly, but continued to reflect slowly afterwards; to me the hook was to go back and try to decode my formative years… My list changed over the hours and days, leaving me finally with the result a bit surprising even for myself.
One obvious problem was Hermann, as I could fill several spots with his work; in the end I decided to boil down several candidates into “Les eaux de colere”. The other was that eventually I cheated – in some spots I really placed THE album, like “Le trezieme apotre” of Natacha or “Les sculpteurs de lumiere” of Broussaile, but elsewhere really the whole series, like “Les 7 vies de l’epervier” or “Les naufrages du temps” (where I chose “Labyrinthes” because of Tapir but it is more about the series as a whole).
And when I started cheating, I couldn’t stop, so I went up to twelve, in order to include other influences – Alfonso Font from Spain and Richard Corben from USA. Although now from Font I like “Jon Rohner” the most, I chose the other album as it was my first encounter with his work and it, like Darko devised, blew my mind at the time. As did Corben, with many books, but especially with “Bloodstar”.
And a special mention goes to “Le marquis d’Anaon” which, being a lot more recent, does not really belong into formative years. But it is a series (as in fact it can be said for all of Mathieu Bonhomme’s work) that to me embodies perfectly the “old flame” in a modern presentation.