Calm, luxury and voluptuousness. It is the sensation that the first pages of 47 strings transmit, but something creaks in that landscape. We read these pages with the feeling that something is happening and we still don’t know what it is. As a threat that is perceived instinctively.
The secret is quickly revealed. A mutant character, capable of taking the form of anyone, wants to seduce the young Ambroise, maybe he has fallen in love or maybe it’s just a malevolent game. Ambroise is a musician who plays the harp, a handsome and shy boy, who will see how little by little life changes around him. The story begins to be filled with characters that transmit authenticity thanks to very careful dialogues. The protagonist’s sister, Ambroise’s partner, the friend from the gym and, above all, the imposing singer Francesca Forabosco – as famous as she is eccentric and disturbing – who will give the story a new direction.
47 strings (Nuevo Nueve, with translation by Lorenzo F. Díaz) is a thriller with an overflowing imagination that immediately catches the reader and drags him into an unstoppable spiral of events. A fantasy that allows us to address issues such as love, gender identity or sexuality, as well as friendship, bullying or toxic relationships. It is an album traversed by epidermal eroticism, which is reflected in almost all its vignettes, which is there, latent, as an essential part of the story and of what the author wants to tell us. Some scenes are clearly close to Kubrick’s universe from Eyes wide shut.
Timothé Le Boucher plays with the time of the story, dilating and pausing it at will, playing with his characters and moving them as if the comic were a chessboard. Everything seems calculated. The silences, the looks, the gestures, the composition of the page or the double pages. The fact that Le Boucher has been courageous and generous in the pagination of the album helps: almost 400 pages that allow him to unravel his story with the necessary rhythm, unfolding it little by little. Initially, the author envisioned a single album of 350 pages. In the end it will be a story in two volumes, which will mean reaching a total of 800 pages.
And to this we must add what makes all this narrative artifact possible: Timothé Le Boucher’s drawing. A realistic, precise, fine, delicate, sensual drawing. A drawing reminiscent of that of the last Moebius – that of The Madwoman of the Sacred Heart – when the famous artist moved away from the feathering of his first works and embraced a clear, icy line. Le Boucher’s drawing is like that, with a cold precision and at the same time intensely sensual, because in his hands those terms do not contradict each other, a style that also draws on the new trends that mark European comics: from manga to his compatriots like Bastien Vives.
The title of the book refers to the 47 strings that a harp has. Ambroise will have to pass some tests to win with each of them a new string for his harp. The tests thus become a form of control and domination by Francesca over her young pupil, who acts as a kind of modern Pygmalion, eager to shape the young man according to her whim. The second part of the album is scheduled to be released this year in France.
