Webcomic Weekly: ‘Bouletcorp’ – Pioneer, Genius… Boulet
by Richard Bruton
Webcomic Weekly, one webcomic a week – simple really. Sometimes we have something very new, sometimes not so much. Sometimes a completely new name, sometimes a name you may well know. But every Webcomic Weekly entry shares two things, they’re comics online and they’re damn good.
This week, you knew we’d get there sooner or later… Boulet.
Frankly, you should all be regularly checking out Boulet’s site The Bouletcorp, required reading since way, way, way back in 2004. Since then, he’s been regularly astonishing with the sheer variety of what he does, the huge number of different styles he can bring to bear, and the absolute quality of everything he produces.
You can find absolutely anything on Bouletcorp, one day it might be a short moment of silliness from his life, or a travel comic (although not recently), it could be lightweight or go darker, it might be a rough 24-hour comic that looks better than most artists can manage across weeks, or it could be some combination of any and all of those things. Frequently the self-deprecating autobiographical works will veer off into spectacular flights of fancy or the spectacular flights of fantasy might end up grounded in real life in some bizarre twist. He does short pieces, he will do rangy long things, he’ll play with the nature of the infinite canvas. Frankly, pretty much every experiment in webcomics that you can think of, the odds are good that Boulet will have done it already at some point.
If you want a few highlights, try The Heavy Lights of January, never more perfect than this year in describing just how we ALL feel, try Darkness (one of the 24-hour comics), or The Long Journey, a spectacular use of the infinite canvas as an integral element of the adventure as he goes old school 24-bit to tell a tale of computer gaming gone wonderfully out there, or Kingdom Lost, the very essence of going from your very typical fantasy adventure to mundane reality, or his ridiculously good take on Harry Potter, or a simple take on American food, or… oh, sod it, just go through the archives yourself.
And for such a pioneer of doing the thing he does online, it’s remarkable that he is still coming up with the goods. Perhaps not so often, although given the last year we all had, we can give him a lot of leeway there, but instead of doing a greatest hits thing, I thought we’d give you a look at just a little of what’s been happening in 2020…
First, from August 2020, February To June, a Boulet-esque look at how the last year got away from us all a little…
Or this from August 2020 – Gestures to Protect the Others – another pitch perfect Covid year thing…
June 2020 – Little Papers
March 2020 – My Psychological Micro-Disorders
Bouletcorp’s online comics have been collected in his Notes volumes since 2008, but you can also find his early fantasy comedy Raghnarok, (Glénat, 2001-2009), La Rubrique Scientifique (2002-2005), Le Miya (2005) and Womoks (with art by Reno, 2001-2004), he succeeded Lewis Trondheim on Donjon Zénith (2006-2007), wrote La Page Blanche for artist Pénélope Bagieu (2011) and illustrated Zach Weiner’s Kickstarter funded children’s book Augie and the Green Knight by the American author Zach Weiner (2004) – that particular Kickstarter did rather well, eventually raising $384k, well over the initial $30k target.
And all of his Bouletcorp material is essential work – go look at it right now.
