"Charming, innocent and empathetic... Rancourt passes the reader a gift: the ability to experience and see a venal adult life through the forgiving, blameless and easily-wounded eyes of a child."-Chris Ware, from his introduction
In 1980, Sylvie Rancourt and her boyfriend moved to Montreal from rural Northern Quebec. With limited formal education or training, they had a hard time finding employment, so Rancourt began dancing in strip clubs. These experiences formed the backbone of the first Canadian autobiographical comic book,
Melody, which Rancourt wrote, drew, and distributed, starting in 1985. Later, she collaborated with the artist Jacques Boivin, who translated and drew a new series of
Melody comics for the American market-the comics were an instant cult classic.
Until now, the Rancourt drawn-and-written comics have never been published in English. These stories are compelling without ever being voyeuristic or self-pitying, and her drawings are formally innovative while maintaining a refreshingly frank and engaging clarity. Whether she's divulging her first experiences dancing for an audience or sharing moments from her life at home, her storytelling is straightforward and never sensationalized. With a knowing wink at the reader, Rancourt shares a world that, in someone else's hands, might be scandalous or seedy, but in hers is fully realized, real, and often funny.
The Drawn & Quarterly edition of
Melody: Story of a Nude Dancer, featuring an introduction by Chris Ware (
Building Stories), places this masterpiece of early autobiographical comics in its rightful place at the heart of the comics canon.
Rancourt, Sylvie: - Sylvie Rancourt was born in Northern Quebec and moved to Montreal in the early 1980s, where she began performing as a nude dancer and recounting her experiences in comics form. In the 1990s, Rancourt collaborated with Jacques Boivin who translated and illustrated her stories for the American market, selling over 200,000 copies. A compilation of early Melody comics was recently published in France and nominated for a prize at the 2014 Angoulême Comics Festival. Sylvie Rancourt lives in Abitibi, Canada, with her husband and five kids, and she spends much of her time painting.
Ware, Chris: - Chris Ware is a writer and artist and has contributed graphic fiction and thirty-two covers to The New Yorker since 1999. The author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, and Building Stories, which was chosen as a Top 10 fiction book by both the Times and Time in 2012, his most recent Rusty Brown was finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein award and named among the New York Times' top 100 Books of 2019. His work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York and the Galerie Martel in Paris. In 2021, Ware received the Grand Prix de la Ville d'Angoulême and a solo retrospective of his work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2022, traveling on to venues in Switzerland, Italy and Holland; it will conclude at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2025.
