Review by Win Wiacek

Some years ago the Louvre Museum in Paris began an intriguing and immensely rewarding collaboration with the world of comics, each year commissioning a new graphic novel with the author’s only instruction being to utilise the Louvre’s world famous collection. Cruising Through the Louvre was 2012’s beguiling bande dessinée, but not presented in English translation until 2016.

It’s a multimedia paean to the art of drawing presented as a beautiful, oversized hardback graphic art narrative following the artist on a bewildering tour of the Louvre’s galleries as he searches for his beloved Jeanne.

As he continues, he realises that the pictures on the walls, the statues in the halls and the mementos of world history all form a perfect sequential narrative like his own comics works. It leads to the revelation of how the art and the observers are all locked in a mirror-clear relationship feeding off and entertaining each other.

Author/artist David Prudhomme manages to be beguiling, expansive and charmingly funny by turn, but this is no gosh-wow Night-at-the-Museum thinly concealed catalogue of contents from a stuffy edifice of public culture. Rather, here is a sedately seductive, introspectively loving examination of the power of art and history to move the masses and especially the creatively inclined.

Supplementing the voyage of narrative interaction is a fact-packed data-file section detailing the accoutrements and educational and scientific achievements of the institution, subdivided into mind-boggling details about ‘The Building’, ‘The Works’, ‘The Visitors’ and ‘The Agents’. The rear of the book features all the traditional additional information and dedication addenda you’d expect and hope to see.

This is another astounding and marvellously magical comics experience no art lover or devotee of the visual narrative medium can afford to miss.