The opening pages of chapter one, ‘The Southerner’, kicks us off by introducing one of the two central villains of the piece and his first victim, Monsieur Comtois, an employee of Paris-Duverney. The first frame uses a label to inform the audience where we are (i.e. Paris), with The Southerner waiting outside a church. Inside, are the Comtois family. This immediately sets up a contrast between the respectable, God-fearing family inside the church and the villain outside, more interested in reading a newspaper than listening to a morally improving sermon. Another contrast is set up in the following two rows: in the fourth and fifth frames we see The Southerner in the role of the boss, getting information and giving orders while in frames seven and eight we have a sympathetic focus on the victim, in the midst of his family, comfortable in each other’s company and indulging in a bit of gentle banter. The final frame on the first page brings these two elements, the family and the gang, together, as The Southerner approaches Comtois when he leaves the church. This final frame is a turning point that transitions us to the second page and an ominous shift in mood: the first row of the second page shows Comtois having now been detached from his family and walking away with The Southerner, the family unsettled by this stranger. This isolating of Comtois becomes increasingly apparent to the audience in the second row as he is lured to a boat shed on the bank of river where the rest of the gang are waiting. By the very final frame of the page the trap has now become apparent to Comtois who stares into an empty box that was supposed to have contained army uniforms. It also raises the question in the audience’s mind about what will happen to him next which, like the final frame of page one, transitions us smoothly to the final page of this particular sequence.
‘Casanova in Paris: The Shadows of the King’ is freely available here.
27 long form articles on Casanova’s life and times are freely available here.
#eighteenthcentury #graphicnovel #storytelling
