A Brazen Gaze in Pénélope Bagieu’s ‘Layers’
A review & an interview with Bagieu’s translator, Montana Kane
At 2022’s Pop Women Festival in Reims, France, Alison Bechdel, the American comics icon known also for her inadvertent film theory, sat down for an interview with Eisner award-winning French cartoonist, Pénélope Bagieu. Their conversation flowed naturally in English, even as it reflected a cross-cultural exchange. At one point, Bagieu brings up the frequent attempts to ban Bechdel’s 2006 bestseller, Fun Home. (I shared the clip with my students this fall when we studied Fun Home, which happened to coincide with Banned Book Awareness Week. Swear I didn’t plan that.)
After Bechdel american-splains the religious right-wing censorship movement (I’m kidding, she was great), Bagieu shares that she has in fact had to redraw ‘controversial’ parts of her feminist cartoons for US editions over the years: covered up Josephine Baker’s nipples, excised storylines about abortion activism. “That’s barbaric,” Bechdel comments. (I agree.) Bagieu, always the storyteller, saves the best for last: she had to edit a scene depicting an erection under a blanket. “I had to remove the little tent,” Bagieu says, helping us laugh through our dread. Both cartoonists are all too aware of the influence the book ban crowd attributes to their “funny pictures”––their accessible, visually pleasurable storytelling format so suited to that other super-powerful storytelling tool: irony. Sometimes it’s comic, sometimes tragic, or else Bechdel’s preferred tragicomic.
During their warm and varied discussion, Bechdel shares that her work is shifting away from memoir and into autofiction, a return perhaps to her early work, the canonical Dykes to Watch Out For, which appeared in the 1980s and 90s in indie newspapers like the Village Voice. Bagieu’s trajectory is the opposite: after more than a decade making autofictional comics, she’s ventured into the world of non-fiction. Her pivot includes work on more overtly political projects, such as her acclaimed strip for France’s Le Monde newspaper, Culottées, translated as Brazen for Anglophone readers, brief portraits of extraordinary, lesser-known women from across world history.
Now, Bagieu has turned to her own life story for subject matter, and the result is her most nuanced work to date. Les Strates, or Layers, tells vignettes from her coming-of-age in the tradition of Lynda Barry, Bechdel, and others. The collection juxtaposes deceptively domestic “firsts” in a young person’s life––the childhood bond with a pet, the teenage paramour––with other, darker rites of passage of young adulthood, experiences filled with grief, and sometimes casual violence.
Bagieu turns to her own life story for subject matter, and the result is her most nuanced work to date.
It was her chapter called “Déjà Vu” that convinced me of the gravitas of this memoir, one using the finest tools of comics to make a prescient feminist commentary about the relationship between silence and shame. Told in parallel vertical columns, “Déjà Vu” recounts two slumber parties seven years apart during which Bagieu, a child in the first column and a teen in the second, is the target of sexual abuse. Bagieu draws with a split-screen format, at first using only visual tableaux to establish the two banal party scenes. Then, each scene takes the same dark turn.
Iris Brey, feminist film critic, director, and author of 2020’s Le regard féminin (The Female Gaze), recently directed a film in split screen, called Split. In one promotional video for the film, Brey explains that in fact a woman filmmaker in the 1930s, Lois Weber, first utilized split-screen, in her 1913 film Suspense. Split screens offer multiple points of view, and in Suspense, it’s a three-way split showing a burglar, a woman being burgled, and the police officer on the telephone with her. We experience each of their separate subjectivities at the same time; they coexist in their mutually exclusive boxes of reality, and we get to watch it all unfold, all at once.
The split screen furnishes the viewer with more than one vantage point and therefore a broader understanding of a situation’s ironies, and sometimes its tragedies. “Déjà Vu”’s split screen generates both, the similarity of the parallel columns a chill down the story’s spine. One sequence consists only of wordless, darkened scenes, slowed to almost stopping and nearly empty save for floating pairs of eyes. We can’t see the specific acts of violence ensuing, only their effect on each character, and only through that window to the soul, the eyes. When we once again encounter Pénélope’s eyes in the light of day, we’ve been trained to search them: to see and seek her, her humanity. That’s why what haunts me more than the floating, terrified eyes in the dark panels are the bright eyes on the next page, the ones insisting to a parent that everything’s fine. It’s a convincing enough performance for the person just outside the frame, but not for us, who know what’s behind her brave face. These scenes show almost nothing, and yet they remind us of everything.
The force of “Déjà Vu” also comes from its doubling: the horror of repetition, reinforced by a complicit darkness that comes to symbolize the silence and pain Bagieu’s parallel selves carry alone and into the future. Refusing the linear ideas of liberation and justice that #MeToo often seemed to promise us, Bagieu visualizes time not as horizontal, but vertical, illustrating the ways our experiences layer onto each other, the unspoken atop the unspeakable, dragging us down rather than forward.
Comics, their split screen, their representation of time as simultaneously linear and non-linear, their ability to hand us back the control over where to put our eyes, and how ––
–– and is that why comics are great for feminist stories, which often require a different kind of time, a different kind of seeing, to be understood? ––
–– and is that why Bechdel’s Fun Home and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) top the charts for most banned books in the US in 2023? Is it because they, their books, let us look, let us study another’s eyes, let us choose where to put our eyes and how, and for how long, and to look as long as we want, grant us that freedom to look, and to identify with, and to care about?
––and is the experience of visual, literary pleasure while reading an inoculation against that harmful kind of looking, the kind of looking that flattens ‘not-me’ into a object, and a target?
It’s our layers that make us subjects. Bagieu’s book proves that exploring those layers also makes us wise. Her book will inspire many others to do the same.
When I learned that Bagieu’s American publisher First Second, an imprint of Macmillan, planned to market her book as YA, I reacted with skepticism. Would this infantilize the book’s material? Would it take the book off of critics’ radars? Then I considered a younger me. Might the weight of her own cycles have lifted sooner if she’d read these humanizing comics as a young adult?
During an interview on France24, the host comments on Bagieu’s word choice for the title, Les Strates. As the word’s root might suggest, strate can refer metaphorically (like in English) to entrenched social class, as well as more literally to the deposits of rock and mineral that comprise the earth: strata, we say. The interview host poetically notes that in order to see “les strates,” the earth has to have been broken, exposed. Bagieu delights in this interpretation, affirming: “That’s why it’s strates and not couches,” another French word for layers. These are sedimented layers, formed over time and deep underground. These are strata we only see if we’re willing to expose our stories to the light.
While a nuance like this can fade with translation, there is so much to be gained by bringing Les Strates to (especially young) anglophone readers. To think more about some of this, I reached out to Bagieu’s translator, Montana Kane, a novelist who has translated over 300 graphic novels. Our written exchange appears below and has been condensed. (With thanks to Montana and her publisher for use of the images below!)
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Staff Picks: Was there any debate about what to call Les Strates in English, or was Layers the unanimous choice?
Montana Kane: I was not involved in that decision, but the final title wasn’t the one I originally saw. It can take a lot of brainstorming on the part of editors (and sometimes translators) to come up with the perfect title, and there are often quite a few ideas thrown into the hat.
SP: Layers is often laugh-out-loud funny. What’s it like to translate comedy from French to English?
MK: It depends entirely on the kind of humor. There are some books that I find difficult because they depend almost exclusively on wordplay and puns that are language––or culture-specific (and that I might not personally find very funny). The second I first laid eyes on Bagieu’s Brazen, when I was sent one chapter to translate to see if I would be a good fit, I fell in love with her humor. It is one hundred percent the kind of humor I connect with, which is why translating her books is always such a treat for me. Even when addressing difficult themes, her sense of humor comes shining through; it is intricately linked to her voice. Her adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches is a very funny book, and I had a great time with that one. Translation is all about language, and on top of that, I am a novelist myself, so when I really connect with a graphic novelist’s voice, I am particularly excited to take on the project. I grew up reading some very funny French-language comics that I can still recite by heart to this day. So humor is definitely a huge draw for me. I will cite two more examples of French books that are available in the U.S. that I thoroughly enjoyed working on as a translator because of their humor: the first one is The Old Geezers, about a bunch of senior activists stirring up trouble, which was released by Ablaze Publishing; and the other one is The Grande Odalisque, published by Fantagraphics, a two-book series about a trio of sharp-tongued, butt-kicking female cat burglars who steal paintings from the world’s greatest museums using fancy toys such as rocket launchers and hand-gliders. Both of those series are a total hoot and highly recommended.
SP: How much did you consult with Ms. Bagieu during your translation process? Is it common for the authors with whom you work to be involved in their own translations?
MK: I haven’t any direct contact with Penelope Bagieu on any of the 3 books of hers I’ve done. Out of the 330+ books I’ve translated, I think there were only one or two instances when I was in touch with the author, so no, in my experience, it is not common at all. Usually, if I want something clarified, the publisher will pass it on to the author, but that doesn’t happen very often.
SP: Do you have a favorite story from Layers?
MK: I really liked the first story, about her cat. First of all, the drawings of the cat are both tender and hilarious. Second, it’s a story that anyone who has loved and lost a pet can relate to on a very deep and personal level. The way Bagieu mixes humor and poignancy, which is expertly conveyed in both her language and in the tiniest details of her drawings, is one of the things that make her such an extraordinary comic book artist.
SP: Ms. Bagieu has discussed having to redraw parts of Culottées to censor scenes featuring abortion, nudity, and sexuality for American publication. Layers, on the other hand, with its frank and unfiltered discussion of sex, bodies, and gendered violence, is being marketed as Young Adult in the US. When you’re translating, how do you think about these cultural and market-driven contexts?
MK: I do recall that there was one chapter that didn’t appear in the U.S. version of [Culottées], because it was difficult material that was deemed too sensitive for younger readers. It was the story of Phoolan Devi, who went from horrific abuse and violence as a child and a young woman in India before going on to become the leader of a band of rebels, then a human rights activist and a member of Parliament. Coincidentally, and perhaps of interest to your readers, I translated another French graphic novel about her, by Claire Fauvel, called Phoolan Devi: Rebel Queen (NBM Graphic Novels), which I recommend.
Part of a translator’s job is to adapt their language and style to whatever book they’re working on, which will vary considerably based on things such as subject, genre, time period, linguistic style, tone, and, yes, target audience. That’s why it takes some pretty specific skills and a thorough knowledge of both the source and target language and culture to be a good translator of comics and graphic novels. It’s a lot of dialogue, and you have to be comfortable with dialogue.
SP: What are your hopes for this book as it travels to English-language readers?
MK: I would hope that it gets the exposure and attention it deserves so that it can introduce a large number of English-language readers of comics and graphic novels to an amazing French author whose books are humorous, smart, poignant, thought-provoking and empowering. And I would hope that those who discover and enjoy Layers go on to read Brazen, a collection of stories in which women from different time periods and cultures rise above circumstance, social station, conventions, oppression, abuse, prejudice, discrimination, violence and obstacles of all sorts to achieve greatness in the fields of art, science, athletics, government, human rights and more.
Montana Kane is the translator of over 330 graphic novels from France and Belgium. She is also the author of the Brandy Martini novels, a gritty and humorous crime series starring a former Chicago detective turned small-town private eye at the top of the Colorado Rockies.
Further Reading:
Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women and Why Comics?, and her recent Atlantic article on Maus and book bans.
Iris Brey on the French feminist podcast, Les couilles sur la table.
