The Girls of Salem – Voices That Fanaticism Tried to Silence

NÚCLEO CENTRAL

Créditos

Thomas Gilbert © Dargaud 2018

In 1692, in the rigid Puritan colony of Salem, a group of young women is caught performing a forbidden ritual in the woods. To escape punishment, the girls — led by Abigail Williams — claim to have been bewitched, and begin pointing the finger at their neighbours. What starts as a lie told to survive turns swiftly into a wave of collective hysteria that consumes the entire village. Through Thomas Gilbert's raw, visceral line, The Girls of Salem immerses itself in the young women's point of view, laying bare the misogyny, the religious fanaticism and the hunt for scapegoats in a community in crisis. More than a reconstruction of a historical episode, the book is a mirror held up to every witch hunt — past and present.

Thomas Gilbert

Born in 1983. He spent a year at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and three years at Saint-Luc in Brussels, specialising in comics, before launching his career as an author in 2009 with the first volumes of two series: Oklahoma Boy (Manolosanctis) and Bjorn the Morphir (Casterman).

His earliest influences go back to L'Association, which helped him grasp how much the author's own perspective matters in building a narrative. Today his sources of inspiration include the worlds of Taiyo Matsumoto and Michael DeForge.

In his graphic novels, Gilbert looks for a strong connection with the reader by taking on provocative questions, hoping to stir the reader's emotions and share his own energy. He worked at the Atelier Mille in Brussels, a space he shared with fellow comics artists including Jérémie Royer, Émilie Plateau, Léonie Bischoff, Nicolas Pitz, Flore Balthazar, Tiff and Monsieur iou.

In 2018 he published Les Filles de Salem with Dargaud, later adapted into a pocket edition by the same publisher in 2022. It is a gripping and terrifying plunge into the narrow, oppressive world of the Salem colony in seventeenth-century New England.