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Rating: ...there is almost nothing online about Jean Bosc (or BOSC as he liked to sign).
Since I stumbled upon his book (the only one?) JE T'AIME published by Milano Libri in 1974, almost by chance at a flea market, I have discovered almost nothing about him.
As if he didn't exist, as if he had never existed.
A French author with not an easy life, indeed.
Perpetually depressed, a reluctant cartoonist ("and without a shred of talent" he seems to have said while showing his drawings), a storyteller of melancholic and silent married life, his first drawing was of a man preparing the tree on which he would hang himself (see fig).
Born in Nimes in 1924 to a family of winemakers, in 1945 he was sent to Indochina and from there it seems he never recovered.
He returned depressed and broken, and in 1952 he moved to Paris. The monthly Paris-Match was the first to believe in him and published his bittersweet, humble, and always self-destructive satire.
The cartoonist Wolinski in 1962 wanted him for the magazine Charlie, but he declined the invitation with a heart-wrenching letter of few words.
"Thank you for thinking of me but I have been confined in a clinic since June. I am out of control and have not drawn anything for months. I believe I have exhausted every resource and now I am completely empty."
His only book translated into Italian, this "Je t'aime" presents strips of paradoxical situations of non-communication, of continuous misunderstanding: mothers, wives, superiors, children.
He often ends his strips with hearses, processions, characters digging their own graves in the utmost indifference. Yet, paradoxically, it brings a bittersweet smile and much tenderness while reading these strips in dirty and irregular black and white.
And so too will be his exit from the scene.
He will shoot himself in the head in 1973, at only 49 years old.
Alone and forgotten by everyone.
Even by Wikipedia.
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