The Cigar That Fell In Love With A Pipe

The Cigar That Fell In Love With A Pipe, drawn by Nick Abadzis, but written by the French director and writer David Camus, tells the tale of Conchita Marquez, Cuba’s most famous cigar roller, and her doomed love for a indifferent pipe whittling sailor.

Conchita, whose life is devoted to cigars, develops an allergy to tobacco that kills her (not lung cancer folks!) and dies, her soul transmigrating into one of the last cigars she rolls. The sailor gets struck by lightning and his soul occupies a pipe he was carving.

The comic itself opens years later, chez Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth of olde worlde Hollywood fame. Orson is smoking and musing on the genius of Conchita and Rita Hayworth is running around being fiery and tempestuous. Through strange fate (lazy writing) both possessed Pipe and Cigar find themselves united again by the famous director…

The words have been translated from the French, so it’s hard to know precisely where to lay the blame, but Camus, or his translator, delivers the whole thing in the omnipotent I-Am-Storyteller mode, which from its opening “Once Upon A Time” onwards grates with a cheesy folksyness and superficial charm. The characters are ciphers; there’s a fat sad girl, a slowpoke sailor, a bon vivant director, a candescent actress, and there’s not a spark of life to them beyond these thin traits. The plot winds its way along convenient paths of least resistance and until petering out in tiny phut of what the fuck.

So, a mighty big shame about the story, but some of the pictures are lovely, but at £15 a go you want quite a bit more than a self-consciously far out bit of cutery with some nice pix.

By the way, if you want to read some really, really good comics by Nick Abazdis, try Hugo Tate – O, America or the seminal Laika.