Joan the Maiden
This week, as a twist to the usual oenologist character of the weekly comic and at this time of regional Joan of Arc festivals, it is an historical strip cartoon published in the french edition of 'Heavy Metal" magazine in 1976 which is on our front page program (Joan arrived at Chécy on 29th April 1429 and liberated Orleans on the following 8th of May.
Once upon a time, on this day of June 1426, appeared in the kingdom of France a dreamy, proud and… bold as well, shepherdess!
The Joan of Arc story – as well as her legend – reinterpreted by one of the masters of eroticism in drawings: from the patriotic awakening of the maiden of Domremy to her war epic, via her meeting with Gilles de Rais, Paul Gillon revisits the myth of Joan of Arc in an album of realistic and aesthetic drawings, where black and white colourings omit no details of historical reality, nor any suggestion of the most frivolous lives of heroes of the time.
Paul Gillon is a magician, he makes an interpretation that appears truer than the story itself by reenacting the era and the miracle of the Maid – frail creature that divine voices will at the same time lead to glory and to the stake – and by imagining the relationship between Joan and Gilles de Rais which, along the pages, turn clearly much more carnal.
Paul Gillon is a magician, he makes an interpretation that appears truer than the story itself by reenacting the era and the miracle of the Maid – frail creature that divine voices will at the same time lead to glory and to the stake – and by imagining the relationship between Joan and Gilles de Rais which, along the pages, turn clearly much more carnal.
Jehanne seen by Gillon is a young woman, neither more fragile or stronger than another one, but driven by a faith out of norms: angry and divided, naive and uncompromising, or alternating between elation and doubt phases. From the taking over of Orleans to the sentence, she brings us back to the most beautiful part of our humanity.
While this comic strip adaptation will no doubt scandalize the most sectarian of Joan's followers – as a passionate woman, she lives an erotic adventure with the hansome Gilles de Rais – the fact remains that this adaptation is read with pleasure, it gives to the Maid of Domremy a freshness and a certain humanity through a discreet eroticism. A nice moment of historico-saucy relaxation… but not to put in every hand.
