GENTE DI STRADA

At the festival

Comic book author and illustrator, Matthias Lehmann works around the stylistic and formal boundaries of the comics language, playing with ambiguity and contamination. Different influences overlap in his works, creating unexpected intersections and a unique atmosphere. With his deep mastery of the engraving and scratchboard techniques, Lehmann comprises among his major sources of influence the Franco-Belgian tradition (from Hergé to Franquin) as well as the American alternative comics of Robert Crumb and Charles Burns, down to the formal experimentations of Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine. His storytelling rejects linear narrative and prefers to follow convoluted paths full of digressions, detours and surprises. As a result, his comics as well as his illustrations are always characterized by a profound emotional texture tempered by irony.

At BilBOlbul, Lehmann curates a project especially designed for the showcases of “Cheap on board”, and presents the Italian edition of his latest book, La favorita (part of the Official Selection at Angouleme 2016 and recently published in Italy by 001 Edizioni), an amazing graphic novel about childhood and sexual identity that plays with different genres and narrative experimentation in order to achieve a complex, nuanced realism, halfway between grotesque and emotional.