Je préfère écrire ce commentaire en anglais car ce livre mérite d'être connu bien au delà de frontières françaises.
A couple of weeks ago, during a lonely night spent diving on the internet, I stumbled upon a short commentary from an uncharted blog. It was my mistake: a typo while googling for new works by Paul Bonner (a fantasy illustrator), and the wrong hit at the wrong line in my list of googlesearch results. After some five seconds of amazement, there was a selection of fine graphic novels standing in front of me. All in all the author of the blog, "inspiration for artists", did show some good taste for sure, but there was something strange too. Without even noticing, my eye had been already caught by an excerpt of S.Phelipot's art, an excerpt from Ma'at... and I could not move away from it. Words cannot describe the feeling. Put all that simply, Simon Phelipot, a self-taught artist, could be best described with a methaphor: take Dave McKean and think of what he could have done, had he devoted the last ten years to painting instead of getting carried away with other media and filmmaking. The story doesn't matter here, and I won't even try to spoil it. The masterfully crafted visuals stand as poetry on their own. Each panel tells a story on its own: it'll make you forget all the rest.
As far I can see, this graphic novel is the result of a thoughtful assembly of real paintings, then refined with delicate touches on photoshop (but it's just my guess). The outcome is a mesmerizing blend of colored patchworks challenging the divide between handmade craft and the digital. Page after page, you enter the daydreaming of a lonely female figure, as other characters linger around her as ghostly manifestations. The text is an un-obstrusive presence ' sparse voiceovers and a few short,very concise dialogs ' turning the whole read into something close to contemplation.
The negatives: faced with the tremendous artwork, its soft tones, and its unique feeling, the digital lettering appears out of place. One would compare with better examples, above all, the 1992 edition of Signal to Noise, with that passionate and meticulous collage made of printed or handwritten strips of paper... Anyways, this like splitting the hair! This book is simply a masterpiece. And I still wonder why so few people know of its existence! Definitely Ma'at deserves to be a centerpiece in your collection among the finest of your graphic novels and books of illustration!
