On February 7th, our friends at New York Review Comics are publishing Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet. We are pleased to present an excerpt from chapter 1. Following the pages is a text by Jean-Christophe Menu about the book.
TWELVE YEARS OF CORRECTIONS
The Goblette told me about the famous day: the drunk reunion with the “fireman,” the colored pencils that Nikita already had, “Bleeding,” the chest “from when I brought back from when I was with the pirates,” which collapsed, the Turbo injection … “Roger Out!” The whole thing, you know? The perfect scene to begin the necessary autobiography, and to attempt to arrive at, of course, the top floor.
It was 1995. The first pages of the first chapter were as impressive as they were pungent. Each time I saw them, there was oil paint modifying the pages. This troubled me a little, because I saw that black and white wouldn’t suffice for rendering such nuance. Events transpired which resulted in the autobiography being put on hold on multiple occasions. There were other books, expositions, trips; the autobiography returned, left again, returned.
The method had changed: grey pencils now steadily rendered Brussels and Charleroi, but it was the same story from the pages of 1995, which, for their part, had continued to yellow. Reintegrating their sepia tone and their now-old style with the new-present was a way for Dom to defy time, the true first subject of the book, completed twelve years after it was started. This book smells of oil, grease pencil, humid wood, the disorder of the street market; it exhales twelve years of well-tempered promises, carefully untied and resolutely wrapped up. Pretending Is Lying breathes like no other book -- Jean-Christophe Menu, editor of original L’Association edition
