L'escalier truque

I don't know much about Jean-Pierre Duffour, apart from what I've been able to glean from Wikipedia (fr) and the most useful Lambiek encyclopaedia of comic creators. Apparently, he works in advertising or something. He doesn't publish many books, though he has worked with a couple of big names in French comics, Lewis Trondheim (Lapinot, Donjon) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). His drawing style is very naive, but precise and clinical at the same time. His stories are like if Kafka wrote children's books. The characters are all simple, often based on animals, and have very basic motivations, but they seem to be caught in frustrating and surreal situations which they can't escape from.

All the stories in L'Escalier Truque take place in a depressing concrete building with a seemingly infinite number of floors. We start with Floor 352: The Noise under the bed, in which an Elephant hears a noise under his bed and before long is being pursued through his flat by shadowy monsters. On floor 298. a mouse with a briefcase is trying to get back to his floor after work, but the lift is broken, so against the advice of a supernatural gatekeeper, he takes the stairs, which get higher and higher, until he is barely able to scale them. The stories can be read as just stories, or as existential metaphors, or as visualisations of some kind of psychological state. Are the shadows that pursue the elephant from under his bed his own fears? Is the mouse engaged in a futile struggle against the natural order of things, by refusing to wait for the lift to be repaired?

Elsewhere, on other floors, stories pit the individual against authority (as when a cat tries to see his boss to ask for a raise, but his feet grow so heavy on the way that he cannot continue) , or seem to hint at the ultimate pointlessness of existence (as when a dog jumps out of the 443rd floor on the advice of a phone call and then spends the rest of the story in trivial considerations on the way down). If anyone has seen the movies of Roy Anderson (Songs from the Second Floor; You, The Living), you will be reminded of this.

It's a shame that the book didn't remain in this vein, or even better, try to suggest a philosophy that holds all these strands together. Unfortunately, in the last third, the quality of the stories dips noticeably, as in the 1st floor: Justice, in which an all too familiar scenario, the Kafkaesque trial takes place.  If you've read Kafka, or Koestler, Orwell or Chesterton, you'll find the story here, the longest in the book, retreading old ground without very much visual interest. Still, the rest of the book was excellent, and I really wish M. Duffour was a little more prolific!