Arsène Schrauwen

In 1947,Arsène Schrauwen embarks on a liner. He crossed the ocean to reach a mysterious colony. Olivier Schrauwen’s grandfather made this long journey at the request of his cousin Roger. On the spot, he resides on his relative’s vast estate and painfully acclimates himself to local life. Once on his feet, Roger reveals his plans to him. Together, they will create the impossible, a utopian city in the heart of the wilderness that will be called “Freedom Town”. Achieving this goal will be a very difficult undertaking.

Arsène falls madly in love with Marieke, his cousin’s wife, when the latter is interned because of a temporary mental imbalance. Arsène will then leave alone and inexperienced at the head of the expedition to the promised land. He will have to face the dangers of the jungle, come to terms with his feelings for Marieke and deal with a strange tropical virus that threatens to decimate his men. Gradually, he will lose control and drift away from reality, getting caught up in his own paranoia.

A fantasized biography, a parody of colonialist adventure stories, the story narrated by Olivier Schrauwen is captivating, funny, and resolutely surreal. This rising and unmistakable figure of the new Flemish comic strip is not at his first try. He cheerfully plays with codes and reinvents himself with each of his projects. After a few remarkable publications, the author with a fertile imagination delivers here a great work that will make people talk about it, as much by its ambition as by the mastery of its execution.

Thanks to a perfectly thought composition, the reader is invited to get lost in the course of the events and the dreamlike digressions of the main character. To this end, Olivier Shrauwen uses an atypical graphic device mixing figurative representations and geometric forms that sometimes border on abstraction. His charmingly old-fashioned style is accompanied by a blue and red two-tone color scheme; didascalies delimiting the real from the imaginary.