Born in Mexico, Émilie Gleason grew up in Belgium, lives in France and last weekend was in Canada, where she attended Toronto Comic Arts Festival for the debut of Salz and Pfeffer, her first book for the American market, published by 2D Cloud. Pfeffer is a tidy and respectable man who dreams of becoming a children’s illustrator. A night he is abducted by three aliens looking as evil brothers of Mickey Mouse. Salz and Pfeffer is a funny comic, drawn with an old-fashioned pencil style and with a strong sense of dynamism. Gleason’s work could seem a cartoonish version of C.F. and Gabriel Corbera’s comics and this amusing 76-page trip is violent, ironic, surreal and definitely worth your attention, as Émilie’s other comics, available at her online shop. Below the first pages of the book.

Nina Van Denbempt is a Belgian artist born in 1989 and graduated in illustration in Ghent, a beautiful city in Flanders where also talents as Brecht Evens and Brecht Vandenbroucke grew up. She founded Tieten Met Haar collective with other girls from Sint-Lucas School of Arts and it’s in the fourth issue of their anthology that I first encountered her work, where deformed bodies, irregular lettering and the juxtaposition of different techniques give life to unconventional pages, as you can see in the comics I’m posting below. The first one is It is not out of the ordinary to dance to jazz music anymore, a four-page story published in the Tieten Met Haar anthology and in the Captain Foggy Brain zine, distinguished by a well-balanced mix of lyricism and irony. The banality of everyday life and of its rituals seems one of the main subjects of Nina’s work and it’s also a key theme in the second feature, Runbeast & Lola in Technoland, a more structured tale set in a future repressive regime, with an original use of color. Nina is actually working on her first full-length comic, Barbarians, a travel-love-action story that takes place in an apocalyptic Europe.