36 EXCURSIONS & EXCAVATIONS in the HERMETIC GARAGE
28: The unpleasantness in the Cafe Viennax
I always remembered episodes 18 and 19 as being the most unsettling in a serial full of distractions, dead ends, jolts and surprises. They continue to fascinate me. The linework is delicate, there’s very little shading. I’m back in the café/bar where I left Grubert in 14. I didn’t realise then how crowded it was. Suddenly there are busy groupings (mostly human) engaged in conversation, and even word balloons seek different planes of depth in the congested pictorial space. Portraiture is strikingly individualized, as are costumes. It rather looks as if Grubert has stumbled into a costume event at a science-fiction convention. Physical details, including wall decoration and an assortment of containers and utensils on tables, give the venue an impressive presence. And the simple action of the first page (5 panels) leads to two of the most memorable panels I’ve encountered in a comic book story.
To begin with, the poised but false sociability of Grubert and his two companions is played out in front of a stranger, who has interrupted their conversation. Batmagoo watches as Grubert is led to another table to meet... Samuel L. Mohad. Mohad has been missing in action since episode 8—though he may be retrospectively identified as one of two figures seen in the last panel of 14. (Giraud may have known who those two figures were when he drew them, but this is not certain.)
On the second page, my attention is returned, in the first two panels, to Sper Gossi and Orne Batmagoo. The latter is as I left him, watching Grubert, and, more to the point, recognizing Samuel L. Mohad:
IT’S THE MAN WHO KILLED THE TOMB ROBBER, HE KILLED! HE MUST DIE ... ARDANT, USE YOUR WEAPON AND KILL! KILL HIM!..
For the reader of English familiar only with the 1987 translation, this may come as something of a surprise. There, Batmagoo’s words are
THERE! THAT’S HIM...! THE ANDROID SPY THAT ZARETH SAW YESTERDAY IN THE LAB... LOOKING OVER THE CHRONOTIC CIRCUITRY!
It’s not really the same thing at all.
Nobody called Zareth has appeared in the story up to this point, and no one will be identified as Zareth at any later point. Neither the lab nor the chronotic circuitry will be invoked until the last episode.
It would appear that in 1979 Giraud decided to provide Sper Gossi with an apprehensible rationale for shooting Grubert’s spy, but probably a more important motive for the adjustment was providing a link to the explanation, in the climactic installment, of what’s been going on. Two things, however, are lost:
Batmagoo, in 1977, was aware of what transpired in Mrhu, back in episode 4. How he knew Mohad was the pilot of Star Billiard is not immediately clear; but neither is it clearer, in the 1979 revision, why he should identify Mohad as an “ELECTRONiC SPY” (“ANDROID SPY ” is the 1987 translation), nor how Mohad gained access to the lab—nor how, having been spotted, he managed to get away. In 1977, that an associate of an agent of the Tar’haï revival movement might be up to date on the destruction of Star Billiard by a Tar’haï juggler seems at least as consistent as anything else in the loose fabric of the story, and shows Giraud in the throes of tying strands together. The revision does a weak job of pretending they were tied together from the outset.
The revision also verbally absolves Batmagoo of culpability in the death of Mohad. Visually, however, his role remains overwhelmingly obvious. Indeed, the strength of the images is only partly in the play of delicate lines and open space that frames Gossi and Batmagoo. Look at the interplay of their expressions, their coming together as Gossi gets to his feet, Batmagoo’s suddenly demonic hold on Gossi—literally: the fingers of his right hand are on Gossi’s pudgy face, his left is pointing to the object of his ire. Gossi is naked ego, in the first panel outraged, in the second unfocused but seeking an outlet; Batmagoo is the underlying impulse rising to fury, the impetus behind its action.
It’s only fair to acknowledge that episode 18 ends on a comic note, with Sper Gossi precariously and preposterously positioned, one leg in the air, on a table, as he takes his shot. An array of nearby costumed characters are startled, while those in the background seem unaware of what’s happening.
Any presumption that this attempted murder might devolve into simple comedy and light-hearted thrills is immediately dispelled by the first panel of episode 19, as a projectile (which grazes Grubert’s helmet) strikes Sam’s forehead and blows out the back of his head.
The immediate aftermath is broken down into a sequence of wide panels which, in place of the simple clichés of narrative action, substitute four fully realised illustrations. The first begins the curiously protracted death of Samuel L. Mohad...
Though shot in the head, he’s allowed time to respond with a sense of surprise and alarm: “SOME ... SOMEONE TRiED TO KiLL ME! ” he says. But no, it’s immediately evident to anyone looking at the panel that someone has killed him—even if he doesn’t realise it yet.
Pathetic as this spectacle is, only Okania attends to it. Sweeping from left to right across the panel, all other eyes are turned in the direction from which the shot issued—not least Grubert’s, whose expression suggests both detachment and disdain, as if some minor irritation has momentarily distracted his attention. Perhaps he, too, does not yet understand what’s going on. But was he not looking at Sam when the shot was fired?
Perhaps, after all, he does understand—but, even after all these years, this alarming mismatch of Grubert’s response to what he has evidently witnessed disturbs me in ways I don’t fully understand.
The next panel offers the most coherent view of the interior of the “Viennax”, as the preposterous murderer, Sper Gossi, almost in the center of the image, flees across the tabletops...
“STOP HiM... HE’S AN ASSASSiN !..” says someone on the extreme left. Gossi protests: “NO! LET ME GO”. Between the act of violence, unleashed against another, and this naked self-concern, is another disjunction, startling and pathetic. The expressions of the onlookers—there are nearly two dozen—are largely blank, or register amazed or irritated dismay at a grotesque breach of decorum. Batmagoo, however, has recovered sufficiently from his incoherent fury in the previous episode to begin taking photographs.
It’s a spectacle, sure enough. The first panel of the second page has three components:
On the extreme left a small group curiously examines splashes of blood on a young woman’s dress. In the background, everyone else is following the flight of Sper Gossi, who seems to have vanished in the smoke and metallic “TANG ” of a parting shot. Meanwhile, both Grubert and, even more surprisingly, Okania, appear to take a fairly detached and practical view of the situation. “GO AND GET THE SUiTCASE...” says Grubert. “I’LL TAKE CARE OF SAMUEL!..”
“ALL RiGHT! ” says Okania. “WE’LL MEET iN FRONT OF THE HOLOG’S CENTRAL TRANSMiTTER, AT THE BOTTOM OF THE YELLOW GALLERY...”
Sam, meanwhile, is still looking at his hand, at the blood on his hand. “SHiT!.. SHiT!..” he says.
The remaining four panels are less dense, and the sequence winds down to its conclusion. “MY POOR FRiEND!..” says Grubert, as he walks Sam away from the Viennax. Sam finally collapses, and his final words are “MAJOR!.. MAJOR GRUBERT...”
“DEAD!..” says Grubert, standing over Sam as Okania returns.
“iT ’S iNCREDiBLE THE WEiGHT OF THiS LiTTLE SUiTCASE!..” she says.
There’s an emotionally fractured quality to the whole sequence that, for me, eerily recalls the moments of stunned, as yet uncomprehending fascination that have followed in the immediate wake of I can’t count how many news reports of the awful events that kept pace with the time of my life. But everything becomes history at last; and the inevitability of what has happened becomes inescapable, becomes at last familiar—something memorable we might even miss if it could be undone. Because where would we be if the things that happened when we were alive were to leave off having happened?
Well, we’d be in another world, much as Grubert is in The Man from the Ciguri—the sequel to the Garage that casts Grubert into a kind of purgatory, reviewing the story of which he was a part, and visiting the artist who drew it—Giraud, who sits with his back turned, drawing, endlessly drawing, as Grubert says:
iT’S A FiNE STUDiO ... AND YOU SEEM TO BE A GOOD ARTiST!... I, MYSELF, HAVE A PENCHANT FOR... LET’S SAY, THE PLEASURES OF CREATiViTY... AND...
But in the midst of this monologue, he sees, hanging on the artist’s wall, an image he recognizes. “WELL... WELL...”
It’s a kind of a carnivalesque recasting of the moment of Sam’s murder at the Viennax; only this time Grubert occupies the foreground. He is startled but alert—as befits a hero. Acrobats leap mysteriously overhead and a crowd is gazing down from an elevated walkway. History—Grubert’s and Giraud’s—has become not merely spectacle, not simply familiar, but decorative. Everything in it suggests pose, artifice. The living moment of art killed by celebration.
Even so, Grubert is not yet ready to discover he’s a created character, rather than a world-creator:
THAT LARGE PiCTURE ... THERE! HOW DiD YOU THiNK iT UP?.. DiD YOU KNOW THAT SCENE HAD REALLY HAPPENED ?!
Or Giraud wasn’t ready to tell him.