It will be released in bookstores on September 20th. The Grocery by Aurélien Ducodray and Guillaume Singelin, first volume of the new Bao series ‘Cherry Bomb’, directed and edited by Zerocalcare.
Michele Rech thus debuts on the other side of the fence with a comic that has the ability “to connect many different stories and situations and bring them back to a single choral fresco”, explained the Roman author, with a style “that demonstrates an often overlooked truth: even the cutest puppets, if they act well, can interpret great dramas”.
The selection of works
In his selection process for this and future publications, Zerocalcare favors those comics “that I always wanted to read in Italian, but that for some reason no one dared to import – he declared -. I like the excuse of being the intermediary between my comics tastes and the public, and I do it with a clear conscience, because in this series there will never be anything that I am not absolutely obsessed with”. It will be a series that will follow his personal taste, which means “that they will be very different comics, from each other and above all from what I usually tell, but I hope that readers will be able to find something of what I found when I discovered them”.
When Caterina Marchetti and Michele Foschini, the editors of Bao, asked Zerocalcare to curate a series within their catalog, they were groping in the dark. “We didn’t know what kind of comics he would suggest we publish,” they point out. But trusting his preferences brought them back to the early days of their publishing activity, “when we explained to readers, almost apologetically, that the only criterion we used to choose what to publish was: ‘These are the comics we like to read.’ So Cherry Bomb became a very personal challenge for us too.”
The first exit, The Groceryis a story set in Baltimore, United States. Elliott has just arrived in the neighborhood, where his father has taken over a grocery store. He wonders if he will be able to make new friends, adapting to the new environment much faster than expected. Between Iraq veterans looking for their place in the world, diabolical bosses who survived six shocks of the electric chair and a gang of foul-mouthed kids, it is a choral story that is irreverent and denounces the distortions of Western society.
The cover
