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Rating: To the question "what is the funniest, most erotic, vulgar, politically incorrect, hallucinatory, raw, misogynistic, anarchic, absurd, funny, insane, emancipated, and absurd comic of the '80s?" The answer can only be one: Édika, a name, a guarantee.
Édouard Karali, known as Édika, is one of the most daring French cartoonists I have ever read. His short stories (brilliant!) of just a few pages, sketched with bold strokes directly in pen (without pencil!) on white paper, are the most "free" and imaginative that can be read in the field of "contemporary comics" and have been collected here, in this book (the first of a long series) related to the old TOTEM era—now defunct. How to combine the genius of Helzapoppin, the outrageous sex of Russ Mayer's movies, the schizophrenic pace of the early Almodovar, and the comic ideas of the Monty Python, all rendered into comics—today!
The Universe of Edika is populated by characters and situations that are absurd is an understatement.
PRIMARILY, everything revolves around an impossible family: father (certainly himself, self-caricatured, lazy, lecherous, depraved, stingy, cowardly, erotomaniac, and the list goes on), a wife (housewife, sexually insatiable, ugly, stressed, annoying, etc.), two children—a boy and a girl (worse than the parents) and the dog Clarkghiebol, the true mascot of the series, embodying the worst vices of the entire family.
With his stories that start from a simple insignificant detail of everyday life (a malfunctioning TV, a dream, the sound of a dripping sink, a clogged toilet, or otherwise), Edika takes off without a shred of a script, narrating a series of chain gags that build on each other, catapulting us into faraway worlds without coherent meaning, but the only thread connecting the scenes is the text, the story, the gags... for the rest Edika doesn't care about beauty, coherence, style, logic: the only mistress is the gag. And I assure you, you'll cry from laughter!
His skits almost always include a buxom nymphomaniac, a sadistic priest, depraved cops, old erotomaniacs, dwarf and impotent wealthy old men (uh… no pro-government jokes, huh?) and paradoxical situations on the verge of the absurd. The author himself, for example, on more than one occasion, asks the reader for help to find him a "dignified" ending or reduces the frames to postage stamp size to be able to finish a story, inserting an improvised ending on the spot.
Edika's reckless stories are truly a burst of genius and nonsense that is unique in their kind. An "unhealthy container" of all our human baseness where degradation always runs along the edge and where there is no limit to malice and all the worst ugliness of our behaviors, filtered by a hilarious stroke and absurd jokes fired at an impressive speed. A fervent mind, an overwhelming imagination, and a dirty and "instinctive" stroke make this comic (almost impossible to find now) an unmissable cornerstone of totally free comedy, tailor-made for those who love to laugh at everything and everyone, defying rules, conventions, and good taste.
All these years, I've always wondered "whatever happened to Edika, is he alive or on the nudist beach on the coast of Ostia with a telescope ogling the exaggerated boobs of his outrageous pin-ups shouting 'WHY SO MUCH HATE'"?! :-)
I hope to find him sooner or later at some newsstand, bundled with Sorrisi & Canzoni TV instead of all those half-baked gadgetry that plague us (among CDs, DVDs, or comics always presented in a thousand different sauces). An author like Edika should be rediscovered because he's still very current... and whoever finds him (maybe at some stall) shouldn't let him slip away. I am absolutely sure that such things will be read less and less in the future. Alas.
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