The work of Norbert Moutier was discovered by chance three years ago at the Puces d'Orléans (Loiret) by Xavier Girard, former professor of ESAD, the city's Ecole supérieure d'art et de design. "I went with my girlfriend more with the idea of equipping an apartment than ending up with a collection of comics," he says. However, the couple's curiosity awakens in front of the stand of a second-hand dealer who accumulates tens of thousands of popular comic magazines from the 1940s to the 1970s: "There was a cardboard box that obviously did not interest many people, placed on the ground, from which come out some magazines of artisanal manufacture. Quite quickly, we assume that they come from a frenzied collector, who must have extended his passion for the illustrated press by the manufacture of comics... »
"I bought the whole lot!"
Xavier Girard, who discovered the Work of Norbert Moutier at the Flea Market in Orleans
A regular at the Puces taps him on the shoulder and puts him on the path of Norbert Moutier, a former Parisian bookseller and director of series Z, born and died - in 2020, at the age of 78 - in Orleans: "I did not buy a comic book... but the whole lot! Xavier Girard laughs. The beginning of a – copious – collection of 1,000 fascicles created between 1946 and 1960 by Norbert Moutier when he was still a child and was inspired by American heroes such as Tarzan, the Phantom of Bengal or Zorro. A collection that Xavier Girard continues to feed today and which was the starting point of an investigation that aroused the interest of many actors, publishers and amateurs, among the most pointed, of independent comics, fanzines, comics and cinema bis. "Picsou Magazine" even dedicated, in its May 15, 2023 edition, 8 pages to this major figure of the counterculture.
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Touched by the story of this personality unknown to the majority of Orleans, the central media library of the town offers until May 27 the exhibition "Norbert and the heroes". For his part, contacted by Columbia University in New York, Xavier Girard, who devotes all his time to bringing this collection to life, will travel to the United States in the fall with the hope of "taking this exhibition there, to this country that fascinated Norbert Moutier so much".