Baladi mocks civilizational antics

The South Seas are an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Pastor Johann David Wyss places his famous Swiss Robinson, an edifying story in which the Zermatt family, father, mother and their four boys, are shipwrecked and, like his predecessor, Mr. Crusoe, settle on a desert island whose resources they exploit with the help of God and in accordance with the principles of capitalism. The preface to the 1990 edition by Ramsay/J.-J. Pauvert, believes that in this novel “more or less dowdy (…) the most silly devotion disputes it with a judgmental philosophy which would give the least imaginative child the desire to become a hoodlum”. Alex Baladi is not a thug but an underground comic book author, respected from Geneva to Berlin, his two points of attachment.