Republished in all its flamboyance, the work of this American genius has retained all its subversive and poetic force.
The year is 1972. A charismatic hippie warns, microphone in hand, that he is going to present satirical cartoons loaded with sexuality and that anyone too uptight(“stuck†) better leave. Then follow one another strange and beautiful drawings featuring lizards and slightly naked women to whom the young man lends his voice live. Called cartoon concert, this happening was immortalized in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and is available on YouTube.
The American Vaughn BodÄ“ also gave his show in France, especially during the 2e edition of the Angoulême festival, in January 1975, which he crossed like a rock star. Well before anyone else, this visionary artist, born in 1941 and put into orbit by the rise of underground comix, imagined how to bring his phantasmagorical universe off the pages to share it on stage. Sadly, he died six months after his Angoumois escapade, strangled during a solo sexual game that went wrong. Like a cutter’s stroke tearing a leaf, this accident puts an end to a career that promised to be intense and even more revolutionary.
BodÄ“ did not have the work and longevity of a Crumb or a Corben, but his legacy has endured, notably thanks to hip-hop culture. À New York, theÂgraffiti artists began painting his iconic character of Cheech Wizard, a sorcerer wearing a Phrygian cap, on the walls. In France, a book in the format of 30 by 40 cm, published by Futuropolis in 1975, just after his death, established him as a myth.
But we had to wait for this gourmet complete of Deadbone Erotica to enjoy in good conditions the colorful and existential deliriums of Bodē, his surprising, morbid, psychedelic and poetic humor. In the foreword, the French publisher puts these violently exhilarating stories in their birth context, that of the sexual liberation of the sixties and seventies. In any case, the often stupefying and hallucinogenic pages of what constitutes almost a art book have in them what it takes to avoid an overly formalistic reading.
Deadbone Erotica by Vaughn Bodē (Delirium), translated from English (USA) by Patrick Marcel, 272 p., 40 €. In bookstore.
