Chaminou et le Khrompire

Kim Thompson wrote an excellent series of articles a couple of years back on the occasion of the publication of his Fantagraphic translation of Sybelline (as Sibyl-Anne) on the life and work of Raymond Macherot. In one of his interesting asides, Thompson discusses Macherot’s first work for Spirou, “Chaminou et Le Khrompire”, in pretty glowing terms.

"...one of the defining masterpieces of Franco-Belgian comics, and is both a huge leap beyond and summation of his previous work: It’s a secret-agent funny-animal thriller, very self-aware, with some off-kilter characterizations (Chaminou is a bit of an egomaniacal dandy and occasional screw-up) and some genuinely dark moments. (Macherot tended to go a little more graphic in the animals eating one another premise than most cartoonists.) There’s a scene in it that conceptually duplicates the final scene in Freaks, one of the most horrific scenes in any movie ever made, and plays it for laughs. It’s just unbelievably bold for the time (1964), one of those art objects that seems unique and decades ahead of its time, like Night of the Hunter (one of Macherot’s favorite films, incidentally) or Kiss Me Deadly."

Thompson goes on to note that readers were not exactly enthusiastic about the new direction Macherot was taking.

"The readers were baffled, the publishers were dismayed, and even Macherot’s fellow cartoonists including Franquin — to his discredit, I must say — didn’t care for it [...] and Chaminou went on the scrap heap."

After reading this, I just had to get hold of a copy of Chaminou et le Khrompire, which is more difficult than it sounds, as there aren’t that many copies around, and those that are tend to be priced between 50-100 euros, which is more than you might want to pay, even for a ‘defining masterpiece’ of Franco-Belgian comics. I eventually, as these things go, ended up with two different editions, one from 1979 (25 Euros), and the other from ten years later, published in a J’ai Lu pocket edition(5 Euros), with many frames cut into pieces to make them fit onto the page (what the hell?)

After a write-up like Thompson’s, it was inevitable that Chaminou would come as a bit of a disappointment. After reading it, I had to shrug my shoulders and say (to my discredit, no doubt) that I’m on the side of Franquin and the unthinking reading public: Chaminou et le Khrompire is no defining masterpiece, and I’ll tell you why.

There’s no doubt that Macherot was hoping Chaminou would be his masterpiece: you can see he’s put everything he has into creating the world of Zoolande, in which Chaminou is based, with it’s up-to-the-minute furnishings, architecture and vehicles. The character designs are faultless, and for once, Macherot doesn’t change drawing instrument every three pages as an experiment, which lends the thing a visual coherence which even his best Chlorophylle stuff lacks. Yes, Chaminou is a masterpiece on a technical level, but as a work of art, it just doesn’t work in the way Chlorophylle, for example, does, of have a tenth of its charm. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, whereas the hero here is relatively interesting (although you never find out much about him, which is frustrating), the villain doesn’t arouse the sympathy that Anthracite (a good contender for best comic book villain of all time) does in the Chlorophylle books. Anthracite is an eternal underdog, which is crucial in gaining your sympathy, so that you are half rooting for him, even as he tries to kill our heroes, much as with Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. The villain in Chaminou, however, Governor Crunchblott, is already a powerful figure, and this means the reader dislikes him from the start. As for the story, Chaminou is rather like an episode of The Man from Uncle, and has all the 60s paraphernalia of secret trapdoors, pool of sharks, and so on. The story is full of suspense, but it short on laughs. Most of the gags are actually quite annoying, like the hero’s secretary, who stays in bed and shouts at him all the time, or Chaminou falling down the stairs. It seems that compared to Chlorophylle,  although the veneer of the world Chaminou occupies is more grown up, the humour has become less sophisticated. Nothing in the book, for example, matches the scene in Chloro a la Rescousse, in which Anthracite tries to hijack a fighter jet with a pilot who can’t fly, or indeed any of Anthracite’s classic attempts to escape from prison. I should, while I am at it, demystify a remark that Thompson makes about a scene that ‘conceptually duplicates’ a scene from Freaks. Well, a character does get turned into a duck, but then that kind of thing happens a lot in cartoons, so it isn’t such a big deal, although it is a strange scene all right. 

It’s a shame that Macherot’s hopes for Chaminou were not fulfilled, and it’s nice to believe the cliche of the public that is too dumb to recognise the masterpiece that breaks the mould, but Chaminou et le Khrompire just isn’t the lost masterpiece that Thompson claims it is. For once - well, actually, not for the first time, the public were right.