Reiser Jean-Marc: Život je sjajan

Jean - Marc Reiser: Life is great

From orgies in pre-Nazi Paris, through inevitable loneliness in old age, to explicit depictions of the love of a man and a woman, Jean-Marc Reiser in his sixth comic book Life is great! profiled again as an excellent connoisseur of the human condition, an insightful commentator on social reality and a born satirist.
He published his first comics at the age of eighteen. Barely an adult, Reiser brings to the world vivid, unique characters with a simple drawing style, whose simplicity and vulgarity do not at all cancel out their complexity and layers. It is precisely in this duality that his artistic strength lies - Reiser introduces a kind of "literary" content weight and a critical approach to social issues into the comic narrative. He curiously and thoroughly looks behind the political stage of France in the 60s and 70s, into the hypocrisy of the distorted nature of modern man, into the importance and insignificance of warfare.
The specialty of comics as a medium is to shorten, strip, and with a minimum of words and images convey the strongest possible message. Although it doesn't go as deep as literature or depict as detailed as a film, a quality comic deservedly boasts the striking power of poetry. Reiser is well aware of this, which is evident from his ability to bring the most complex concepts of human nature closer to the reader in just a few squares.
Due to the brevity and ease of conveying messages, the comic strip has profiled itself as one of the most popular politically satirical art forms throughout its two-century history. In addition to being visually attractive and easy to transmit information, comics are also extremely suitable for sending political messages, for opening space for public criticism of the social context and social actors, but also opening an exhaust valve for political frustrations.
Jean Marc-Reiser, as one of the pioneers of the European comic counterculture, together with two colleagues founded the popular French satirical monthly Hara-Kiri in 1960. The main targets of the magazine are established and entrenched socio-political structures. From Hara-Kiri, they do not shy away from attacks on the Government, religious institutions and other holders of political and economic power. That is why the French government banned the magazine several times, and in 1970, after the controversial headline about Charles de Gaulle's funeral, it was completely canceled. Hara-Kiri, unfortunately, was committed by harakiri. The successor of Hara-Kiri is the famous French weekly Charlie Hebdo, for which Reiser regularly draws.