Jean-Christophe Menu

Jean-Christophe Menu , born in 1964 is author, model maker and French editor of Cartoon.

Life and work

When it was small, JC Menu dreamed to be published in the newspaper of Spirou . Its recurring hero: Lapot, for which will be created the Journal of Lapot (a collection car-will be published later as a mégalozine).

During Years 1980, after being last a time by the workshop of cartoon of the s.t.o.l, where it meets Stanislas Barthélémy, it founds AANAL (Association for the apology for the ninth free art) with already Mattt Konture and Stanislas. This small structure publishes the first Spidery scrawl, as well as the review the Lynx , which is directly resulting from a fanzine high-school pupil from JC Menu and P. Lamy ( the Lynx with hairs ). the Lynx accommodates many authors now recognized (Dupuy-Berberian, Jean-Claude Götting, Placid, Muzo, max, etc) and publishes polemical articles, denouncing with ferocity the apathy of the medium of the cartoon of the Eighties (who will not escape the crisis announced then). This criticism of the reigning academism will be found in the body of the Festival Off of Angouleme, Glob Off (or Globov , or Glauboff , or Globof ) the years which follow the end of the Lynx (1987).

Meanwhile, JC Menu was pointed out with the atrocious character of Meder, in the Psikopat . It is published in Collection X of Futuropolis by Jean-Marc Thévenet, with its first book (not car-published), an adventure of Lapot: the Portrait of Lurie Ginol . Some time afterwards, it is Meder which enters the collection Gros Nose, in the same editor. JC Menu recalls this period in its Report of Control, going back to 1988: Newspaper of an existence of Cartoon.

In 1990, always at Futuropolis, he collaborates in the review Labo , which will know only one number. With the synopsis of this number, future founders of Association. This label, true continuation of Aanal, will be created a few months later, with around JC Menu, Mattt Konture and Stanislas, David B., Killoffer, Lewis Trondheim and Mokeït. Few books are born, for lack of means, but they are a whole an event: the Pale Horse , Carrots of Patagonie , etc

In this logic of exploration of the medium cartoon (or narrative figuration), JC Menu and the Lewis Trondheim publish Less than one Quarter of second to live , or how to write hundred strips starting from an about eight boxes. This book is a prelude to with the foundation of the Sewing room of Potential Cartoon (Oubapo, during Oulipo of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec) within Association in 1992. JC Menu is the president.

Genuine spearhead of the autobiography as a cartoon, with the Rise of the High Evil of David B., Booklet of Phamille of JC Menu or the Persepolis of Marjane Satrapi, Association tries especially, through the choices of models and design of Menu to dissociate standard data base, the album of 44 pages hard-bound color, which is a purely European format, and which it is necessary according to JC Menu to exceed. Always accordingly, Association organizes one of the more leading great events as a cartoon: the meeting of almost three hundred authors, within one only work as a cartoon, entirely dumb (its reading is thus universal): Comix 2000 which leaves to the end of the year 1999.

In 2001, JC Menu created its own structure, “JC Menu Editor”, in order to be independent of the college of the founders of Association in its decisions. This label will publish only one album, the very classieux “Notebook”, of Jacques Tardi, which will be too expensive and will not find the public awaited.

In 2003, JC Menu signs the graphic design of the books published by Joann Sfar at Bréal Jeunesse.

At the beginning of 2005, JC Menu published Plates-bandes , a lampoon on the French market of the cartoon and the drifts of which it is according to him victim. Without claiming to summarize a demonstration of 76 pages, it denounces there the vulgarity and the formatting of the productions of the large editors, like their tendency to recovery: it estimates that they encroach on the sector of the independent ones, without proposing true alternative, just variations affadies of great creations.

He became in addition Régent of Magirosophie of the Collège of 'Pataphysique and is shareholder of the weekly magazine the Tiger.

Association is orphan today of several of its most known creators and/or authors: David B., Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim indeed announced not to more want to publish within the structure which they had helped to impose. Without true official reason, it however appears that important differences in opinion between Menu and its comparses were right of their cohesion. In the same way, the possibility their from now on is offered to propose their works with a complete leading freedom at publishers plus “general public” (Dargaud and its Pilot fish collection, in particular, but also Futuropolis for David B. and Delcourt for Lewis Trondheim.)

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