Under one of the opening pages of an episode of his hit series “Jonathan”, which Bernard Cosendai tends to create as seductive long shots of exotic sceneries, his artist signature “Cosey” can be found very small on the edge, but here it is accompanied by a miniature of a Swiss alphorn player – a rare reference of the cosmopolitan author in every respect to his home country.

Bernard Cosendai, alias Cosey, was born in Lausanne in 1950, but even the seemingly English spelling of his pseudonym indicates that he was the opposite of the usual immigrant pattern: his family had come to Europe from America.

And he himself wanted to go back.

Andrew Plathaus

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All he had for that was his drawing board and his talent for storytelling.

With the beginning of work as an assistant to his slightly older but already established compatriot Derib (actually Claude de Ribaupierre) in 1970, Cosey initially specialized in western comics.

But one of the things in the east that turned out to be his real dream country was Tibet.

Cosey developed a great admiration for the local landscape, culture and especially Tibetan Buddhism.

However, the monastic state, which had been occupied by the Chinese since 1950, was still a closed area in the 1970s, so Cosey only went there in his comics: With "Jonathan" he began an adventure series in the French-language comic magazine "Tintin" in 2017, which took its title hero on a biographical and spiritual search for traces in led the Himalayas.

Public success was immediate and in 1982 the seventh volume in the series won the most important French comics award in Angoulême.

And other language areas also got a taste for it, not least German.

Last year the cycle ended with the seventeenth album.

A Himalaya of images

Original pages from all seventeen volumes are hanging in the Cartoonmuseum Basel, close together, arranged like the silhouette of a mountain range.

And the text passages on the walls are sometimes designed in such a way that the lines of writing resemble temple roofs.

There are also – a novelty at this location – Tibetan cult objects in display cases: loans from the nearby Basel Museum of Cultures.

Cosey has actually studied Tibet for his comics, first from afar and then, as soon as it became possible, also by traveling there regularly.

He is a staunch supporter of the country's independence, and that attitude has passed to his Jonathan.

But even if "Jonathan" is by far Cosey's most popular work, his two-volume stories "In Search of Peter Pan" (1984/85) with their action set in Switzerland and the "Buddha of Heaven", which in turn is set in Tibet, also belong to this category. (2005/06) on the masterpieces of European comics.

The table showcases with work materials, sketches and preprints show how such albums became what they are, as is typical for Basel.

Cosey reached a new audience in 2016 when he rekindled an old childhood love of his own and, with the permission of Disney, drew a "Mickey Mouse" origin story for a French publisher, very much in the style of American comics from the 1930s.

But he enjoyed showing things that would have been unthinkable at the time, such as a shaving Mickey Mouse - that was considered much too intimate in the interwar period.

Cosey has reinvented not only his characters, but also himself over the past fifty years, sometimes in an old-fashioned style.

The course in Basel is a pleasure.

An aesthetic lesson.

And a political one at that.

Cosey—Vers l'inconnu.

In the Basel Cartoon Museum;

until February 26, 2023. No catalogue.