Fleischeslust

Erwin is actually old enough to retire, but he cannot bring himself to give up his local butcher’s shop – not least because he cannot find a successor. Times are changing; people are eating less meat, with tofu and oat milk now in vogue, and Erwin’s pride in his craft seems increasingly out of step with the times – Erwin is plunged into an identity crisis. Comics about butchers are rare. Yet it is only logical that Martin Oesch should choose a butcher’s shop as the setting for his first graphic novel: before studying illustration, he completed a butcher’s apprenticeship. He therefore knows Erwin’s world and his worries inside out. “Fleischeslust” is not a reckoning with the world of butchers and meat-eaters, but a melancholic ballad about the end of an era, about upheavals that Erwin can no longer navigate. Oesch tells the story gently, with empathy, without moralising, in colourful felt-tip pen drawings in which the intense, fleshy shades of pink are particularly striking.