CHINA IS WORTH IT, & even more

MILAD NOURI — TIAN-YOU ZHENG — BIENVENUE EN CHINE — 2021

The very first impression you get when you look and open this comic book, is the mostly black and white, meaning a lot of different greys on the very cover of the book, and then this grey is vastly replaced in the pictures by a light blue color. I find this interesting because the drawing is simple, in a way quite primeval with characters, and surrounding environments rendered with lines only, no complicated drawing, even of faces. It provides the reading some real comfort because the texts, the captions, and the bubbles, are not hijacked by too much color and detail. The blue is some sort of highlighting of the drawing itself. We read — and we do read every single word — the text, captions, and bubbles — from beginning to end carefully. That centers this comic book on the meaning of the words with at times some small details underlining the text itself. This is more the style we find in some cartoons, funny comic strips in the daily press. We are more in this book dealing with some humorous but ideological message, some direct and enlightened commentary of a real situation.

And real it is. Milad Nouri is, in fact, confessing all his crimes, and misdemeanors, and felonies he has been committing and will probably go on committing in this world. This tone of a story-telling confession is fascinating since it takes us into some kind of personal, even intimate, though extremely reserved — but why on earth page 12 does Milad Nouri puts his two hands inside his boxing shorts underwear directly on his buttocks, maybe to catch a flea or to scratch his lower cheeks –, account of Milad Nouri’s life by himself illustrated the way I have said by Tian-You Zheng. It all has to do with China, and the drawing by a Chinese Belgian bi-cultural artist on a story and text from a French Iranian bi-cultural author makes the book look like a picture book from long ago and from China since no bright colors, in fact practically no color except this light pastel blue on a very simple line drawing. We are entering another world, another consciousness, another mind. And I must say the trip is definitely becoming intimate. We are able to project ourselves in this Milad Nouri and behave like him from within him. I must say there are some moments when it is slightly embarrassing…