Back in December I was thrilled to discover that Nicolas Devil’s large-format psychedelic/erotic comic book, Saga de Xam, had been scanned and uploaded to Scribd. The book was published by Éric Losfeld in 1967 in an edition of 5000 which quickly sold out, and has remained out of print ever since. Losfeld died in 1979 but it was always his intention that the book would remain scarce (although a second edition did appear after his death) with the result that copies today command high prices.
Six of the seven chapters had been uploaded to Scribd in December but the seventh and final episode of the time-travelling Saga’s adventures was frustratingly absent. So I’m pleased to report that the final chapter is now available for reading or downloading, prompted in part by the interest my earlier post generated. The seventh chapter sees Saga arrive in the present day (ie: 1967) where she encounters more human conflict in the form of the US military and marauding Hells Angels. The chapter ends with several Exquisite Corpse pages which had Philippe Druillet among their contributors; it was the appearance of three of these pages in the Musée d’Orsay’s Art Nouveau Revival catalogue in 2010 that first brought the book to my attention. The very end of the book has a key to the alphabets used on some of the pages. I’d love to see Fantagraphics reprint this volume in a translated edition but those alphabets would create some difficulties. For the moment the PDFs at Scribd are the only place you can read this unique publication.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Philippe Caza covers
• Saga de Xam by Nicolas Devil
• L’Amour by Didier Moreau
• Gilles Rimbault redux
• Raymond Bertrand paintings
• Raymond Bertrand’s science fiction covers
• Gilles Rimbault revisited
• Druillet’s vampires
• The Art Nouveau dance goes on forever
• The art of Ran Akiyoshi, 1922–1982
• The art of Gilles Rimbault
• The art of Jim Leon, 1938–2002
• The art of Bertrand
This is pretty cool stuff. A few of the covers remind me of Darger’s Vivian girls and the artwork strikes me as somewhere between the Situationist International comic strips and a New English Library psychedelic Dracula annual that I have (although the Dracula comics came a couple of years later, around 71/72):
http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dracula-of-newsagents.html
http://scifiwonderland.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/agar-agar.html
Thanks, I’d not seen any of those before. Dracula isn’t too far from the mark since vampire-film director Jean Rollin had a hand in the story (such as it is) of Saga de Xam. A lot of the horror comics of the early 70s were very groovy, especially those drawn by European artists. I have a couple of copies of Oz magazine from that period, one of which has Dracula advertised on the back; seeing how the pages look it’s understandable. I much prefer that style of art to the EC comics style which I’ve never liked.