Barrel of Monkeys

Book excerpt: Amazing! -Sammy Harkham Florent Ruppert (b. 1979) and Jerome Mulot (b. 1981) began their creative partnership as art students in Dijon, France. Their intensely collaborative comics are drawn by both artists in a shared visual style - simultaneously abstract and gestural - that obscures the individual contribution of either hand. Throughout their work, Ruppert and Mulot deftly interweave the naturalistic and the synthetic, playfully manipulating productive tensions in comics, cognition and social culture. Their complex and dazzling comics pages incorporate visual devices from related media, including film and optical toys. Their cinematic figure drawing enlivens mask-like, schematic faces that alienate even as they solicit involvement. Disorienting, bracing and darkly comedic, Barrel of Monkeys prismatically examines the human bestiary at its most surreal and transgressive. It is their first book to be published in an English-language edition. Rebus Books was founded by Bill Kartalopoulos to publish books of comics and other works of visual exposition that implicitly explore and reveal the expressive possibilities of the comics form. For additional information please visit rebusbooks.net When I’d get Ruppert and Mulot’s books in French, I was perplexed by comics that seemed largely informed by theatre, Eadweard Muybridge and proto-animation. Now that I can read it, I’m delighted by how evil and mean-spirited the work is. -Dash Shaw Ruppert and Mulot explore the dark edges of human behavior like no one else, making the disturbing feel elegant and the elegant feel disturbing. With a light hand, their vignettes tie together slapstick, violence, humor and horror, all while cleverly experimenting with different forms of representation and body language. Barrel of Monkeys is an enjoyable slap in the face from two of the most unique and exciting cartoonists I’ve come across yet. -Lilli Carre