SOKAL

BENOÎT SOKAL AN INVESTIGATION BY INSPECTOR CANARDO Premières enquêtes (T.1), Peperland 1979 Original plates no. 5 and 6 from the story La Mort d'Hortense. India ink on paper Each plate: 30 × 39 cm (11.81 × 15.35 in.) A graduate of Claude Renard's Atelier R at the École Saint-Luc in Brussels, Sokal created the character of Canardo in the "black style" he had discovered a few months earlier with Franquin's Les Idées noires. These plates, which parody the Frankenstein myth, already contain all the ingredients that were to make him a success: an exaggerated caricature, a perfect sense of narrative and burlesque, and a cynical, disillusioned character who highlights the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.