Sébastien LumineauFables de La Fontaine

As the 400th anniversary of the birth of Jean de La Fontaine draws to a close, Sébastien Lumineau offers a clever extension of this celebration by delivering a modern interpretation of the Fables, which resonates particularly with the current political climate.
Through six adaptations, Sébastien Lumineau plays with the discrepancy between text and image by choosing to preserve La Fontaine’s original text and to affix an anachronistic drawing that places it in a contemporary context. The political significance of La Fontaine is thus accentuated, or even revealed for those who may have missed it. Animal anthropomorphism, a procedure often used in comics, is abandoned here to give man the place he deserves. Through this reversal of the situation, Lumineau questions the reader head-on about the issues of democracy, justice, identity, ecology and political action that he faces on a daily basis.
Although La Fontaine’s Fables are still studied in schools today, it is clear that this teaching does not translate into a real common political consciousness. This is a dimension that the author highlights at the beginning of the book through an autobiographical introduction. With this new light, served by a sharp and expressive line, Sébastien Lumineau reminds us that inequalities, power games, the arrogance of the powerful and the powerlessness of the poor remain.