What happens when two different objects fall in love?
The Cigar That Fell in Love With a Pipe answers this unlikely question with wit, tenderness and a touch of the absurd. Beneath its whimsical Hollywood’s golden age premise lies a story about attraction, difference and the strange ways in which affection can flourish where it is least expected.
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When Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles split up in 1948, she told the press: ‘I can’t take his genius anymore.’ Both sides were said to have been unfaithful.
But David Camus and Nick Abadzis have come up with a loopily different version of the story, one they tell in this charming new graphic novel (words by Camus, who is French; pictures by Abadzis, British-born who lives in New York City). As Camus and Abadzis have it, Welles and Hayworth parted because she smoked the most precious cigar in his collection, an irreplaceable Cuban rolled by Conchita Márquez, the island’s greatest ever torcedora. After this, you understand, there was no way forward; whether these stars loved each other or not, divorce was the only possible outcome.
At the heart of the story is the unlikely bond between the pair, brought to life with personalities, desires, and emotions. Their romance is amusing precisely because it is so improbable, yet the absurdity gradually gives way to something more poignant. Their differences become more than a source of comedy; they become a lens through which the story examines the boundaries society places around human relationships and judges what does not fit within familiar patterns.
There is a particular charm in the story’s personification. By giving emotion to objects that would ordinarily be lifeless and overlooked, the narrative invites us to see the familiar with fresh eyes. The cigar and the pipe embody the awkwardness, vulnerability and longing that accompany any genuine attachment. The result is a story that can make the reader smile while prompting more serious reflection.
What makes the tale memorable is this delicate balance between the playful and the profound. Its humour never entirely conceals its deeper ideas about acceptance and belonging. Love, the story suggests, does not always arrive in forms that make immediate sense. Sometimes it appears in the most incongruous places, challenging our assumptions simply by existing.
Verdict
The Cigar That Fell in Love With a Pipe is therefore more than an amusing curiosity. It is a whimsical meditation on difference, desire and the enduring appeal of an impossible love. Its eccentric characters linger in the mind, not merely because they are entertaining, but because they leave us with a deceptively simple question: how much of what we call impossible is simply something we have not yet learned to see differently?
Does the story sound surreal, even a little barmy? Maybe so. All I can tell you is that on the page it works wonderfully well, becoming an unlikely fairy tale that takes in both the silver screen’s era and the mystique so beloved of cigar aficionados. Abadzis’s drawings are voluptuous and comical, and Camus combines speech bubble wit with the narrative solemnity of a fable.
Orson Welles, you feel certain, would have loved it.
