"Le Discours de la panthère" by Jérémie Moreau (Editions 2024): a (...)

The Panther’s Speech begins as an ancient myth or a classic fable. On a small island, a buffalo is exhausted pushing a mountain with its head. Its purpose is to move it to avoid the fall of a celestial body. A dream makes him predict the destruction of this piece of land. Bitten by a hungry monitor lizard, he runs out of breath and despairs. The monitor, touched by the story of the buffalo, accompanies him in his work as Sisyphus. When his friend dies, he refuses to allow other animals to feed on his remains and tries to put it in the ground.


The Panther’s Speech © Jérémie Moreau / Éditions 2024 2020

Without transition opens a second short animal story, in which an ostrich manages to get its head out of the sand and is surprised at the world it discovers. Next come birds and a rhino, an elephant calf and its ancestor, a hermit crab, a young monkey and its mother, and of course a black panther. All intersect and come together in the six stories written and drawn by Jeremiah Moreau.


The Panther’s Speech © Jérémie Moreau / Éditions 2024 2020

At first glance, this set is reminiscent of a collection of fables, to be located halfway between Aesop and Rudyard Kipling. The animals express themselves there better than humans, interact with a great deal of civility and experience meaningful and even edifying adventures – even if the author carefully avoids making any moral explicit. The ostrich lured for a long time by a mole is rewarded for its emancipation with a constantly renewed wonder. The elephant in charge of the memory of the world frees itself from its heavy obligation when it understands that traces of the past are everywhere.

In a timeless world empty of people, animals are fully involved in their destiny. Endowed with reason, they oscillate between candor and wisdom, dare to step out of their condition, enrich each other. They form a full “humanity”, with its awareness of being in the world, its paradoxes and aporias. However, this world is not frozen. Discussions, meetings and questions lead to questioning. Both the individual and the collective are questioned.


The Panther’s Speech © Jérémie Moreau / Éditions 2024 2020


The Panther’s Speech © Jérémie Moreau / Éditions 2024 2020

The Panther’s Speech is probably Jérémie Moreau’s most mysterious work – it is therefore no coincidence that it will be published by 2024. Beautiful, with a somewhat smooth beauty, reassuring, but hard in terms of the themes mentioned, this comic strip takes the risk of throwing off the many readers who liked Grimr’s Saga (Delcourt, 2017, Fauve d’or in Angoulême in 2018) and Thoughts and folds of the world (Delcourt, 2019). Under an apparent lightness, full of sweetness and mischief, hides a depth which offers the possibility of several readings: multiple readings – this book will not age – and reading to several degrees – animal stories, adventure, moralists, ecologists. ..

The cover, the design and the colors evoke children’s albums. Edited in a large format on thick paper, The Panther’s Speech is a beautiful object designed to highlight the aesthetic choices of the author. Entirely produced in digital form, the work gives pride of place to large images in clear colors but with changing tones. The line is fine and supple, the compositions rigorous but varied. It is not surprising that Jérémie Moreau quotes Winsor NcCay, Taiyō Matsumoto, Chris Ware and Nick Drnaso among his references. A simple leaf is enough for your viewing pleasure.


The Panther’s Speech © Jérémie Moreau / Éditions 2024 2020

The youngest will therefore be able to Speech of the panther It does not matter which way. Everyone will find food for thought. Jérémie Moreau traces there, without pretension, the outline of a philosophy in which man is no longer the center – the panther is also called Sophia. Because his animal characters are not disguises or pretexts, much less an easy solution to deal with human subjects. Of course, what the wildlife he shows can touch every reader and quickly provokes empathy. But animals are worth by themselves and their integration into their environment.

Taking the opposite view of the Anthropocene, in which human technology, associated with megalomania, has led the consequences of human life to exceed the forces of nature, Jérémie Moreau adopts an “extra-human” point of view. The narrative arc that frames the different stories in the book confirms this choice by drawing an invisible but intangible line between man and animal. The Panther’s Speech finally draws the outlines of a humanity outside of man.