“Power no longer relies on terror, but on information.” This is one of the phrases that can be read in Fouché. The dark genius (Norma Editorial), by Kim, the biography of an unscrupulous politician who throughout his life knew how to combine both strategies – first ruthless terror and then the meticulous collection of information – to monopolize immense power during the upheavals years of the French Revolution, in the times of Napoleon and even beyond. Joseph Fouché was always close to whoever held power at all times, whatever his ideology. The France of those years was turbulent: monarchy, republic, Napoleon's absolute power, Bourbon restoration, and in those troubled waters Fouché always knew how to fish with skill.
Fouché is a contemporary of Robespierre, Danton, Marat... however his name is much less known because he chose to exercise power from the shadows. Discretion was one of his best weapons. Also patience, like the one he showed to collect secret reports from the most important personalities in France for years through a network of spies and informants among whom was Napoleon's own wife. Fouché obtained much of this information as minister of police and interior, so this faithful follower of Machiavelli also proved to be a pioneer of what we now call the sewers of the state. Fouché was a commissioner Villarejo avant la lettre.
The life of this controversial character was told by Stefan Zweig, author of The World of Yesterday and Stellar Moments of Humanity, in a biography that fascinated cartoonist Kim. He liked it so much that he decided to adapt it into a sumptuous direct color comic album that drags the reader through the whirlwind of a story full of twists and that relies on the dazzling graphic detail of its images. Kim has done a great job, a true graphic tour de force.
Each vignette is a delicious miniature containing an inexhaustible wealth of detail. The author has put on these pages all his talent as a cartoonist and also all his love for this medium that is comics. Because the patience required to draw an album like this can only be understood from an absolute love for what we now call a graphic novel and which has always been a more modest art, the art of comics.
Kim is respectful of Zweig's original work and that's why this comic has a lot of text. Almost all the vignettes have a banner at the top with the narrator's voice-over text. However, Fouché's story and the continuous changes of scene and situation mean that despite the density of the text, the work is read with passion and without losing interest.
There Kim also plays with the strength of his drawing. The detail is such that he is forced to stop at those vignettes. It is not only the text that forces us to read slowly, but also the drawing that treats each vignette as a miniature, like a goldsmith's filigree. Kim uses a rigid page structure, based on a grid of three strips by two panels, so that the reader concentrates on the content, to emphasize that the strength of the story is in the panels.
And to reinforce that feeling, Kim's cartoons are always delimited by a thick contour line. Enclosing the image on itself. Not allowing anything to escape from there, surpassing the frame of the panel as happens in many comics that seek dynamism in their pages.
