We should be wary of grape harvest buddies: they can give rise to obsessions. Fifteen years ago, while picking grapes in Beaujolais, Gaëtan Petit, alias Gaet’s, met Cédric, a slightly crazy Belgian who told him about his work in a company responsible for recovering valuables from anonymous deaths. Anecdotes about mummified bodies disgust their table neighbors, but they nestle in a corner of the Norman’s brain.
A few years and as many odd jobs later, having become a comic strip writer, the thirty-year-old met Julien Monier, a designer noted for several albums and some acclaimed successes. Two struggling autodidacts, crazy about genre cinema and fed up with pop culture, with a thriller option: the duo gets along wonderfully and imagines R.I.P. (For requirescat in pace, “rest in peace”), the story of six characters navigating the brackish waters of cleaning up death scenes.
Dark as hell, the project was refused by major publishing houses. “In 2018, crime fiction was not selling very well in comics. And the subject was considered too dark,” remembers Gaet’s, who plays his all out of desperation. His father is the founder of Petit à petit, a Rouen publishing house specializing in docu-comics. R.I.P. does not really fit into this editorial line, but, after a whirlwind gestation, the first album appeared in 2018 with a modest print run of 1,500 copies. Five years and four volumes later, the edition of the sixth and last of the series is among the top sellers with around 25,000 copies sold.
Characters more sinister than life
Between the two, titles “that we didn’t see coming”, observe the review of specialized booksellers Channel BD, imposed themselves “as references in their field, driven by enthusiastic word of mouth”. With characters more sinister than life. Maurice, Eugène, Derrick and the others, whose first names provide the titles for each opus of the series, work for a mysterious company which intervenes, before the authorities and the families, when a body is discovered weeks, months, years after his death. Their job: to raid the jewelry worn by dried-up mummies, the savings hidden under a rotten mattress. Until the day when a valuable ring will change their destinies, which are already not really enviable.
Since the first part, the two authors have played the stakhanovists of the board at the rate of one album per year, where the reader is, each time, invited to carry out their own investigation during a treasure hunt punctuated with cult references and clues sown during the story. Here, a pack of cigarettes from a brand glimpsed in a Tarantino film; there, a tag on a wall; elsewhere a detail seen through the eyes of a character which will take on its full meaning in a following opus, when the same scene is redrawn from the point of view of another. As much “narrative games and a somewhat cryptic mise en abyme”, analyze the two authors while bogus themselves with their own emphasis.
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