Trondheim in Space

Kaput & Zosky



This was published a few months ago by First Second (before my last post, even!). It represents a strain of Lewis Trondheim's work that we haven't seen much of in North America: the cartoonist has published over a hundred albums at breakneck pace in Europe, but most of the ones translated from French are either comic fantasy (e.g. the epic Dungeon series he created with Joann Sfar) or anthropomorphic autobiography (like this year's other Trondheim release, the excellent Little Nothings). Kaput & Zosky, however, is manifestly a children's comic, even moreso than his First Second debut A.L.I.E.E.N., which featured such delightful all-ages fun as sadistic eye trauma. This series, though - the adventures of two clueless would-be space conquerers - is composed of brief, gag-laden antics. It's something of a trifle.

But watching Trondheim negotiate these familiar conventions is revealing in itself. He's always been open to franchising and the compromises that attend collaboration (the latter half of these strips, drawn by Eric Cartier, were adapted from an animated tie-in), perhaps because his own idiosyncrasies tend to remain intact. The all-Trondheim bits here are deeply French, absurdist social satires driven less by frantic laser blasts than games of hopscotch and comical financial speculation. The funniest and most mundane story involves Kaput & Zosky trying and failing to enjoy a vacation, with Godardian asides like "They're paid to be submissive." On another planet, rooster-haired blobs follow the duo's every order in joyful, catastrophically literal servitude. I feel that Deleuze overlooked this particular upside to masochism.