DOG MECHANIC IN LOVE

In NBM’s graphic novel, Salvatore (104 6x9-inch pages, color; paperback, $14.99), we meet Nicolas De Crecy’s eponymous protagonist, a crack dog mechanic, who is repairing automobiles as a way of stealing the parts he needs to build his own specialized all-purpose vehicle that can cross bodies of water as well as expanses of land. Love-smitten Salvatore wants to get to South America where he can rendezvous with the wire-haired terrier of his dreams, Julie. He has almost finished constructing this locomotive contraption as the novel opens, but he needs one more elusive part, and much of the first two “parts” of the final work (which is to be  completed, we assume, in the next volume when it is published) is devoted to his search for the missing adaptor.

Into this proposition, De Crecy introduces a major albeit subordinated thread of narrative about Amandine, a nearly blind pig, whose car Salvatore repairs and who then gives birth to a dozen piglets, one of whom, Frank, the runt, gets lost in the sewers of Paris. Thereafter, whenever Amandine shows up, she’s looking for Frank. Of minor significance is another thread about an amorous cow who owns, or did own—once upon a time—a vehicle that is possibly the final resting place of the last adaptor that Salvatore needs. Eventually, we suppose, these seemingly unrelated strands will be woven neatly together in the novel’s conclusion (forthcoming).

Salvatore is essentially a love story, complicated by the everyday struggles we all endure as we find ways to compromise between morality and idealism and enriched by a strain of satire. De Crecy takes digs at wild-eyed liberal critics of our consumerist society and at various avant garde trends in art, but the fundamental mechanism of his story, Salvatore’s mission to built a vehicle that can take him to Julie, is in the protagonist’s confrontation with ordinary hurdles that he overcomes with outlandish solutions: to seduce the heifer with the adaptor, he needs an inflatable bull costume. Why not? De Crecy’s wispy linework compliments the wistful tale with its own graphic eccentricities.