From leaving a Lebanon in the throes of crisis to his emotional wandering in Paris, the cartoonist Joseph Kai draws on his own journey to tell characters haunted by exile, desire, and the metamorphoses of the intimate. His second graphic novel, Beau comme tu changes, has just been published.
In Beau comme tu changes, his second graphic novel, Joseph Kai stages Nour, a Lebanese living in Paris for several years and in search of a new way of inhabiting his life. The story unfolds in a palette of saturated mauve, orange and green, close to the character’s emotions. A shift that Joseph Kai himself knows well. Settled in France since late 2019, as Lebanon sinks into a severe economic and social crisis, he keeps from that departure a very precise image: “The setting is different, but you still wear your old suit.”
Gay and engaged in an open relationship, his character sees his certainties waver when he meets Laurent, a friend-of-a-friend encountered at a drunken afterparty. This prompts him to question how he inhabits his body, his desire, his masculinity. “It’s the story of an intimate reflection, of a person trying to understand his life,” explains Joseph Kai. “Everything emanates from my interactions, from my encounters. In Paris, for example, I’m seeing more and more open couples or couples who are considering opening the relationship; it made sense to talk about it. It’s my modest contribution to the collective reflection on new ways of relating.”
This intimate material had already run through L’Intranquille, his first comic book published in 2021 and largely nourished by his experience. It follows Samar, a young illustrator whose creativity is undermined by the anxiety-inducing climate of a Beirut not fully recovered from the civil war ended in 1990, and about to be shaken by the dual explosion that ravaged the city’s port area in 2020. The story also explores his affective and sexual life, lived clandestinely, and his desire to form connections despite this context.
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Sophie Brennan