Into the "Bleu" with Lewis Trondheim (Looking for Storytelling Prints)

I have a friend who often brings me back from comic fairs the most bizarre things.

A while back he opted for a comic by French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim (Laurent Chabosy), ironically violent and dark A.L.I.E.E.N., that features some alien creatures and a few cute monsters using unintelligible dialogues and getting killed and tortured throughout the entire story (probably a veiled reference to my cynical self...).

This time my friend opted for Trondheim's Bleu.The title and main colour used for this thin booklet calls to mind the artist's imaginary blue monster named Jean-Christophe, but inside there are no seven-and-a-half feet tall monsters.

Indeed Bleu is a perfect example of abstract comic and features only a series of coloured stains or blobs on each page.

The blobs swallow each other, splitting, reuniting and transforming from page to page, so, soon after the story starts, the first pale blue blob has just swallowed a pale yellow stain.

The latter turns into a green blob and the process continues until the very last page of the booklet. Now, if you start looking at the blob with different eyes, you will realise that the blob is actually a creature similar to an amoeba that develops and changes when it absorbs new forms of life inside itself.

So where is fashion in all this? Well, first of all Trondheim built this story on repetition and variation, that are also two vital points in the creation of any fashion collection, while adding a sense of interaction and movement in the story of the hungry amoeba who behaves a bit like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Second, the story proves that even a series of minimalist "stains" can be used to tell a more or less coherent story and I'm sure this principle could be used to experiment a bit with storytelling prints. Fashion students out there, can you create a minimalist print that may also be used to tell a story? For further inspirations, I'm embedding here a video that quickly takes you through Trondheim's Bleu.

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