978
 | |
| Author | Pascal Matthey |
|---|---|
| Language | French |
| Publisher | La Cinquième Couche (16€) |
| City | Brussels |
| Date | 2013 |
| Pages | 48 |
| Format | 20 cm x 29 cm |
| Fabrication | Offset |
| ISBN | 978-2-9303569-4-5 |
| E-book | PDF (52 mb) |
Matthey works a day job in a Brussels bookstore and judging from his surprising body of work as a comics artist, he is already at ease with more conventional forms of graphic narrative. This book, whose title comes from a prefix that designates, in the numeric ISBN system, the category of objects assigned as books, prefigures something different. 978 took ten years to ferment. It's a narrative work exclusively composed from promotional material circulating in Matthey's workplace that advertises new arrivals of mainstream and epic fantasy comics literature. For many years he collected these pamphlets and painstakingly created a new non-representational, grid-based collage, where each page embodies a different mood. Matthey's selective focus on the physical aspects of the comics industry (its underutilized resources) and the non-remunerative value of its paratextual economy, makes this book the ultimate redemption. 978 is a book "with the sound of its own making", a psychedelic trip that emerges through the interplay between work and leisure, text and context, and writer and reader/user/librarian sensibilities.
Reviews: Jean-Charles Andrieu de Levis (du9, 2014, FR), Pedro Moura (du9, 2014, EN), Pedro Moura (du9, 2014, FR).
