It is tempting but it would not be accurate to say that Catherine Meurisse’s new comic puts the big names in philosophy on the couch. What she does is take them down from their pedestal, take away the aura of infallibility that often adorns them, and turn them into human beings. Maybe too human for their egos. And that’s what’s so fun for us readers. Human, Too Human (Impedimenta in Spanish, Finestres in Catalan) is a fun comic book that mordantly portrays almost fifty of the greatest thinkers in history through small episodes of two pages each.
Catherine Meurisse is one of the most intelligent, cultured and ingenious creators in the world of comics. And besides, she draws wonderfully. The emergence of Catherine Meurisse is one of the best things that has happened to European comics in the last three decades. Witty and biting, she has known how to renew humor by drawing on the classics of comics and illustration (Bretécher, Pétillon, Sempé, Quentin Blake) with works narrated from the perspective and sensitivity of our time.
His graphic style is as sharp and incisive as his verb; His characters move as quickly as his mind as he puts together the most disparate ideas to form a coherent and fun story. And this is precisely what he has done in his latest work, combining philosophy with humor, and thus he has created a wonderful comic essay, a book that makes us laugh and think, while forcing us to dust off our old philosophy notes. . His is a methodical discourse (not a discourse of the method) signed with relentless comedy.
The title of the album is a clear allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s book, Human, All Too Human. And it is no coincidence that she declines it as feminine because Meurisse looks at 25 centuries of philosophy, in the only way that a 21st century artist can look at them, making a feminist and contemporary reading, incorporating the gender perspective. Human, too human is also a hygienic and necessary reckoning with some of its outdated or sexist ideas.
With elegant irreverence, Meurisse demystifies these thinkers, intervenes herself as a comic character and through dialogue brings out their contradictions and puts them in absurd but intentional situations. She is critical, sometimes caustic and always funny. She explores her philosophical ideas and extracts comedy from there; It is clear that the author has had to research thoroughly to make these pages that were first published in a philosophy journal.
Playing with anachronisms, Meurisse draws Kant screaming in a karaoke room, turns Blaise Pascal into a tweet addict, places Heraclitus in a river full of pollution, turns Schopenhauer’s philosophy into a product sold in the supermarket and We see Sigmund Freud explaining his life in a talent show to laughter from the audience. Plato, Socrates, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau and Simone de Beauvoir are other thinkers who pass through Meurisse’s filter. An irreverent journey through the history of philosophy, from Ancient Greece to the 20th century.
To facilitate reading even if we have somewhat forgotten philosophy classes, the author relies on the most identifiable elements of each philosopher to make the parody more evident. Furthermore, each double page is accompanied by a brief but very useful final text that puts each scene we have just read in context.
In Humana, Too Human, Catherine Meurisse recovers that humorous-essayistic vein that we had already seen in The Literary Comedy (dedicated to French literature) or in Le pont des Arts (dedicated to the relationships between painters and novelists), a genre that dominates to perfection. Here she also portrays famous people with few and very precise strokes. The cover is a clear nod to a famous and iconic romantic painting by Caspar Friedrich, with the author instead of the (male) character that appears on the canvas. Everything is already on that cover: from the comedy to the graphic beauty typical of this author.
An instructive and hilarious book. An alternative philosophy manual. Some pages that incite reflection and that at the same time are a satire of the history of philosophy and our current society. We knew that philosophy was important, now, thanks to Meurisse we discovered that it can also be very fun when explained to us by someone with so much talent.
