Carlos Nine

Finally a website! I've been hoarding all his books I can get my hands on for a while now. There's still one or two extant. Besides it feels too much like a christmas present you don't open till later--I'm still marinading in the pages of the ones I do have. But a gift arrives anyway. He has a website now.


This image and the one directly below is from his website. There's a lot more there. Copyrights obviously belong to Carlos Nine.

The work of Carlos Nine (pronounced, Nin-ye, as the ever helpful Geof Darrow informs me) is from an alternate world that appears to have been a duplicate of ours except that it's perpetually the late 1900's and it's been tossed into a blender, sloshed and left to recombine itself to continue the stage play of the ages. Human anatomy is of sideshow proportions or is outright fused to ornate household objects; animals talk and walk upright in cartoon convention as well as have anatomically correct human parts (I mean, even them bits o' question), and...well, it's downright unsettling and magnificently genius.



An unpredictable and perplexing storyteller, Nine defies classification. When I asked Joann Sfar how it was to work with Carlos Nine on a Donjon book he has glowing things to say of the opportunity, though he was very surprised with what he got back. "I mean, this is Carlos Nine! Of course, you don't tell Carlos Nine what to do." It was apparently already a coup to have him do a book for them at all.



His work lends itself well to animation, albeit the rather out there kind. Something we don't have enough of, I say. Les Troilets is just that. Apparently done as a collaboration between Carlos and son, Lucas, this frantic madhouse tale in the rubber hose style of character design and animation is a wild musical romp that reminds me of the Triplets de Beville newsreel sequence--only hopped up on speed.



His work just makes me feel so conventional and earthbound but at the same time I'm grateful for artists like Nine who thresh out the far and remote reaches of their mindscapes, allowing us the ease of being able to simply casually drop in.

Carlos Nine website
Station Delta featuring Les Troilets
Lambiek entry on Carlos Nine

Actually, Stuart Ng has a page devoted to Carlos Nine. Visit here.