Paquebot - a Graphic Novel Review

"You remind me more of a kind of Hercule Poirot than a purser, whose job is to let the ladies dance and watch over the welfare of the men ..."

When I open this album I feel like I am going back to 1912, the year that the unsinkable Titanic proved to be sinkable. But the ship, on which this story takes place, turns out not to be the Titanic and is not 1912 but the 1950s. On the Horizon, as the ship is called, there is a grab-bag of people. The ladies, who are introduced on the first pages, suggest that this story is about a meaningless tea-party. But although the pace of the story is not very high, this is by no means a boring graphical novel. The ladies talk about seemingly insignificant things that I feel are only necessary to give the characters more depth. But slowly a more complex story unfolds in which not only the Ladies of the Horizon, but also many other people on board do not appear to be who they say they are.

It sometimes happens that I collect comic books and graphic novels from a number of specific artists and later find out that many of those comics have been written by the same writer. In this case it is Pierre Christin, who wrote the story for 'Paquebot'. In the 90s I started collecting everything made by Tardi, one of the first Tardi comics I bought was 'Rumeurs sur le Rouergue'. In the same period I also collected Bilal graphic novels, which I later gave away to somebody else because Bilals colours were depressing me. But this is just by the by. Charmed by the pastel colours of Annie Goetzinger, who also drew 'Paquebot', I also bought some albums made by her. In this way, I also noticed a growing number of albums in my collection whose stories were written by Christin. When I noticed that I liked the stories of these albums and found out that they were all written by the same man, I decided to collect everything written by Pierre Christin. I even bought the Bilal albums that I had given away again.

Christin had worked together with Goetzinger before they made 'Paquebot' together in 1999. I think his writing style fits very well with the style of drawing by Goetzinger. Or maybe it is the other way around, they complement each other very well in any case. Goetzingers beautiful realistic drawings in soft, friendly colours match the suave pace of the story. 'Paquebot' has an intriguing plot that is doing very well without chases and fights.