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That last characteristic will be shortlived. Ms. magazine has begun featuring a Bretécher cartoon each month on its back page, and others have been popping up in such disparate places as Esquire and Viva. A book-length collection of her work, National Lampoon Presents Claire Bretécher ($5.95), was published in the U.S. last month by 21st Century Communications. Ten volumes of her work have appeared in France, and recent ones have sold more than 100,000 copies each. To Roland Barthes, a leading French writer-philosopher, Bretécher is "the best French sociologist." Nouvel Observateur...
Readers who try to decipher her fullpage, many-framed scratchings may think she has a point there. Bretécher's comic strips, not exactly thigh-slappers, suggest the wry, nervous humor of Jules Feiffer and Garry Trudeau. Her typically flabby, potato-nosed men, women and children often discourse eloquently on feminism, Freudianism, environmentalism, Marxism or some other millstone of doctrine, only to betray their soaring words with some bourgeois inconsistency. There is, for example, the porn-film producer who denounces his working class audience as "pigs" and says he panders to them only to help finance the kind...
...Bretécher has endured that world for 38 years. Raised in Brittany, she reports that she drew her first cartoon at age five and went on to too many years of art school. After teaching drawing in Paris, she began selling freelance cartoons to comic-strip magazines. Among those early Bretéchers were Turnips in the Cosmos, a sci-fi epic, and Cellulite, the saga of a husband-hunting medieval princess. Publisher Claude Perdriel was impressed by some of her more satirical strips, and in 1974 offered her the newly vacant job of regular cartoonist at his Nouvel...
...draws Les Frustrés at home, a sixth-floor Montmartre walkup she shares with her photographer husband (they have no children). Bretécher usually cannot face her drawing board and swivel-top piano stool until the day the strip is due. As comely as her characters are homely, she patronizes the same voguish boutiques and is occasionally oppressed by the same fashionable insecurities as those she parodies. Except one. "The seriousness and dogmatism of the feminist movement have become appalling," says Bretécher. The dogma that appalled her most when she began to sour on the movement...
...Bretécher gets so worked up about the subject that on one occasion last year she came in days ahead of her deadline with eight consecutive strips featuring two rape victims who become famous on the talk-show circuit. That, ironically, is where Bretécher was last week−the American, not the French−making press appearances in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote her book. That task must trouble the satirist without an ideology. "Comic strips are a form of con," she confesses. "All you do is play along with...