Word: cher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cartoonist Claire Bretécher carves up poseurs and hypocrites...
...goes another episode of Les Frustrés, a cartoon strip created by a Frenchwoman named Claire Bretécher and appearing in the leftist French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. For four years now, Les Frustrés has been comic-stripping the hypocrisy from everyday life among the thinking classes. In the process, Bretécher has become a financially secure woman, a cult figure among the trendy Parisians she skewers, and probably the most important French cartoonist never to be heard...
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...