ABSTRACT
Voilà, c’est étrange ça n’est ce-pas, Monsieur? The shop assistant passes over the counter what I have just bought. It is a strange image, indeed, and not a little shocking: the cover on a thin album of bandes dessinées, which I picked up in a small shop in the Galleries du Roi in Brussels – where else would one buy comic-strips? This one is Japanese manga style though. On its rather gruesome cover, a dead body on a slab is covered in blood and has no head. A strong, electric lamp illuminates the headless corpse and the three men surrounding it – two Japanese and one Dutchman. One of the Japanese wears two swords, the sturdy, red-haired Dutchman a blood-splattered apron. On the walls of the small, evidently Japanese, room are anatomical drawings and charts of the human body, evidently not Japanese. Books with more such drawings and pictures lie scattered around. A skeleton is seen in the foreground of the image, its lifeless jaws dropping, almost leaving the picture plane. The drawing is immaculate though; I cannot help but admire the striking realism.
