{"id":3178,"date":"2019-05-27T23:09:02","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T06:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=3178"},"modified":"2019-05-27T23:09:04","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T06:09:04","slug":"meeting-lewis-trondheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2019\/05\/meeting-lewis-trondheim\/","title":{"rendered":"Meeting Lewis Trondheim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nine years ago, (freeze-frame, record scratch, “wait, nine years ago?!” “Oh yes, it has indeed been that long”<\/em>) nine long fucking years ago, one fine day in June (May?), I torrented a bunch of comics off of Demonoid. For those who came in late, Demonoid was a sort-of elite bit-torrent hub that guaranteed quality content. Umm, quality pirated <\/em>content, back in those Dark Ages when the internet was a mud-pit you needed to dive in to and swirl around in for a bit before you grabbed onto something that might <\/em>be good but you wouldn’t really know until you got the dang thing on your hard drive and clicked on it, but then oh no, all your file extensions would change and you could not click on anything anymore and the only way to do anything was to set the computer on fire and move to another city and start over with your life…. Ok, maybe not that dramatic, but close. Things were not synchronous \u2014 you could not press a button and have movies, music, or books streamed to you with zero delay. There was work involved in consumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But Demonoid was a safe space, in the sense that the torrents were vetted properly, and uploaders were particular about what sort of files they put up. My deal with Demonoid was that every night, I would scroll past the comics section, checking for new uploads that looked interesting. From the descriptions and an accompanying Google search, of course. Most of it was filled with random superhero trash, most of which I already read and owned, or random underground trash that I did not like, or porno comics that barely fit the constraints of “porno” or “comic”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Except that night, I came across this series called Dungeon<\/em>, and a creator named Lewis Trondheim. Searching for him led me to French blogs and websites. The cover artwork looked great, cartoon figures done in a minimalist way, and with just the kind of signals that tell you the content within is not for kids. And turned out the American publishers were an outfit called NBM, who were bringing in, among other things, works by Hugo Pratt, reprints of classic Terry and the Pirates<\/em>. Cool. I downloaded the set, and read the first two arcs. The reading order was included in the description, because apparently the series had been published as collections of stories that jump through time and various characters. Even the choice of artists was different, except of course, for the common elements \u2014 creators Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n