Posterity has not erased, but almost, the name of Edmond-François Calvo. Sandra Malfait’s documentary attempts to do justice to this master of animal drawing and pioneer of adult comics, revered by aesthetes and historians, but almost unknown to the general public.
With screenwriters Victor Dancette (1900-1975) and Jacques Zimmermann (1902-1951), Calvo is nevertheless the father of a master work in the history of the ninth art: The Beast is Dead! (1944), a story in images produced clandestinely during the Occupation, recounting the still burning events of the Second World War.
Dear to children’s comics of the time, the process of anthropomorphism is pushed to its climax. The French are played by rabbits and squirrels – with the notable exception of General de Gaulle, dressed as a stork; Hitler and the German army have the heads of a wolf, Goering the features of a pig and Mussolini those of a hyena; the Americans are personified by liberating bison.
Thirty-five years before the first sketches of Maus, another graphic summit in which the American Art Spiegelman depicts his father’s memories of deportation, the animal metaphor is at work to narrate the upheavals of the 20th century. George Orwell did the same thing, during the same period, with Animal Farm (1945).
Nicknamed the “French Disney”
Sandra Malfait dwells very little on The Beast is Dead!, preferring to highlight the incredible destiny of Edmond-François Calvo (1892-1957), a former hotel-restaurant owner who gave up everything to devote himself to drawing, his passion , at the age of 46. Nicknamed the “French Disney,” the autodidact was then spotted by Mickey’s father, who wanted to recruit him into his studios in Burbank (California). Not feeling like a performer, Calvo will say no. Resentful, Disney will threaten to take him to court for plagiarism. In its adaptation of The Three Little Pigs (1933), didn’t American society dress the big bad wolf in a… Nazi uniform? Calvo will modify his canine’s nose in order to avoid a lawsuit.
Is this episode the cause of the memory void into which the designer subsequently sank, as the Museum TV program suggests? It is to forget that Calvo – as much influenced by Bruegel the Elder and Gustave Doré as by Disney – continued to work hard until his death in 1957. It is also to forget that the authors of the comics did not achieve notoriety at that time, with some exceptions, like this former rabble-rouser from the Parisian publishing company who, at the age of 14, went to look for the original plates of Patamousse (a wild rabbit who was sometimes an explorer , sometimes detective, 1943-1946) at Calvo’s home – we will not mention the kid’s name here so as not to spoil the narrative effect of the film.
If Calvo was rediscovered in the 1970s by the publisher and graphic designer Etienne Robial, the documentary – dating from 2012 – does not mention the retrospective devoted to him by the Angoulême Comics Museum in 2020. Three years previously, an exhibition “Shoah and comic strip” in Paris highlighted two panels from The Beast is Dead! dealing specifically with the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. The reality of the “final solution” was, however, very little known in 1944, the year of publication of this masterpiece of war literature, disguised as a children’s album.
