berghahn journals presents a virtual issue from european comic art

Featuring interviews with: Cabu Anke Feuchtenberger Joost Swarte Farid Boudjellal Morvandiau Baru Guy Delisle Karrie Fransman table of contents

I. Interview with Cabu Tanitoc French editorial cartoonist and comic-strip artist Cabu (pen name of Jean Cabut) died in the January 2015 shooting attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices. In this interview, he talks about the evolution of political caricature in France, differing reactions of people to being caricatured by a cartoonist or being filmed, and the use of archetypes in caricature. Cabu also discusses the influences of other cartoonists on his own art, the high points of his cartooning career, his cartoon reportages, and various book publications of his work. II. Interview with Anke Feuchtenberger Mark David Nevins Anke Feuchtenberger is a German avant-garde cartoon artist (b. 1963) with a strongly caricat- ural style. In this interview she discusses her childhood and education in former East Ger- many, historical influences upon her – including Rodolphe Töpffer – and current inspiration, as well as creational techniques and work in progress. III. Interview with Joost Swarte Ann Miller Joost Swarte, the Dutch comic artist, designer and architect, and inventor of the term ligne claire [‘clear line’], played a major role in the conception of the new Hergé museum at Lou- vain-la-Neuve in Belgium. In this interview, he further elaborates on his role as scenographer at the museum. IV. Interview with Farid Boudjellal Mark McKinney Farid Boudjellal is a highly accomplished and well-published cartoonist, whose career now spans more than thirty years (he began publishing comics in 1978). He has received prizes at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD), the national French comics festival in Angoulême: the Résistances prize for Ramadân (1989) and two Œcuménique [‘Ecumenical’] prizes for Petit Polio [‘Little Polio’]. V. Interview with Morvandiau Ann Miller Morvandiau is a political cartoonist and comics artist, and this interview focuses mainly on his 2007 comic book D'Algérie. VI. Interview with Baru: Part 1 and Part 2 Mark McKinney Hervé Barulea, known as Baru, is a French cartoonist of Italian and Breton heritage, who has spent much of his life in the region around Nancy, in northeastern France, his birthplace. VII. Interview with Guy Delisle Kenan Kocak Guy Delisle is a cartoonist and animator from Quebec City, best known for his graphic novels about his travels, such as Shenzhen, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Burma Chronicles, and Jerusalem. VIII. Interview with Karrie Fransman Ann Miller Karrie Fransman is the author of the comic book Over Under Sideways Down which tells the story of a young asylum seeker forced to deal with a series of harrowing events: exile, journey and displacement, and then the struggle to attain the right to remain in the UK. Cabu Reporter

Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc*

Abstract French editorial cartoonist and comic-strip artist Cabu (pen name of Jean Cabut) is interviewed by Tanitoc, French cartoonist and contributing artist to European Comic Art. They talk about the evolution of political caricature in France, differing reactions of people to being caricatured by a cartoonist or being filmed, and the use of arche- types in caricature. Cabu also discusses the influences of other cartoonists on his own art, the high points of his cartooning career, his cartoon reportages, and various book publications of his work.

The most obvious function of the game of caricature is to provide a critical deforma- tion that tends to reform (or to abolish) what it deforms. The language of the artist here joins that of the ‘moralist’: the caricaturist accuses by accentuating a character trait [le caricaturiste accuse un trait], because he is the accuser of a moral attitude. Claude Roy, ‘Esprit de la caricature’1 You know, the 1970s represent a true archeo-world for us today. Those were the Pompidou and Giscard years, with the media bottled up and government ministers who called up journalists on the editorial boards of the public news media. […] Things that were funny in 1970 did not make anyone laugh in 1992 – and I am delighted about that, because the work of a humorist is to be a researcher and to invent new forms of humour. Philippe Val, interview December 20052

* This interview was conducted on 7 November 2007 and was originally published as ‘Cabu repor- teur’ in 303: Arts, recherches, créations 99 (2007), 50–63. It is reproduced here with the kind permis- sion of Cabu, Tanitoc and the editors of 303: Arts, recherches, créations (http://www.revue303.com). Notes by the translator (Mark McKinney) are indicated as such (Trans. note). All others are by Tanitoc, from the original French version. 1 Claude Roy, ‘Esprit de la caricature’, La Caricature, art et manifeste, du XVIe siècle à nos jours [‘Carica- ture as Art and Manifesto, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present’], eds. Ronald Searle, Claude Roy and Bernd Borneman (Geneva: Albert Skira Éditions d’Art, 1974), 13. 2 Philippe Val, interviewed by Alain Barbanel and Daniel Constantion in Médias 7 (December 2005). The quotation is from page 44. Trans. note: Georges Pompidou, after having served as prime minister for more than six years under President Charles De Gaulle, was president of France, 1969–1974. He was succeeded by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was president 1974–1981. Both

European Comic Art 2.1 ISSN 1754-3797 (print) 1754-3800 (online) © Liverpool University Press 132 cabu The history of printing techniques has accompanied artists since saunterers [le badaud] purchased wood-cut prints that narrated the hanging of notorious bandits. Etymology teaches us that ‘reporter’ is an English term from the nine- teenth century and derives from the old French term ‘reporteur’: ‘one who relates’. So what is so special about the idea of a confrontation between reality and a drawing, to create a narrative aimed at a multitude of readers? Some day one must write the history of all the cartoonist reporters, who, from Jules Grand- jouan to Ronald Searle, via Feliks Topolski, crossed social and geographical fron- tiers to capture words and gestures, thanks to their eloquent drawings. Cabu, who was born in 1938, was destined to become a professional sketch-maker and storyteller for the news press: he decided to become a ‘press cartoonist at the age of ten’, admired the drawings of Dubout and of the cartoonists of L’Assiette au beurre [‘The Butter Plate’] and produced a school newspaper, From A to Z (the principal banned its sale!). In 2003 Cabu went to Nantes to view the Jules Grandjouan exhibit: it seemed wise to compare their work of cartoon reportage for the press and to speak with someone who has been a key player in the history of the satirical press in France since the 1950s, focusing especially in this interview on his work as a reporter.

Tanitoc: Recently you visited your hometown of Châlons-en-Champagne, to sit at the stand of the newspaper L’Union de Reims [‘The Union of Reims’]. I would like to go back in time, to your encounter with Jean-Marie Boëglin, in 1953, at this very same newspaper, when he was in charge of its local bureau.

Cabu: I was fortunate to run into Jean-Marie Boëglin, because when I look back at my drawings from that period... they weren’t that great!

Tanitoc: Thanks to that encounter, you began to draw fairground events for L’Union...

Cabu: Yes, and town-hall meetings. I started out like that. Now when I go to the French National Assembly, I think of the municipal meetings of Châlons, but... it’s on a grander scale!

Tanitoc: So you were doing reportage from the very beginning of your career. What form did this take? Sequences of images? Some drawings of important moments, with commentary? Or were you simply taking down visual notes?

Cabu: Sometimes, but because I was not too good at sketching [en croquis], they

were right-wing presidents. Philippe Val is a musician and journalist, who (with Cabu and others) helped relaunch the left-wing satirical Parisian weekly Charlie hebdo in 1992. He is currently its editor and publisher. On Charlie hebdo, and Hara-Kiri and Le Canard enchaîné, see Jane Weston’s article in this issue of European Comic Art. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 133 were really snapshots; not direct drawings [du dessin direct]. Not sketches such as I make now, on the spot, directly. They were a form of commentary on news items. For example, I made drawings about the week’s films being shown at Châlons.

Tanitoc: Do you think that independent production is the best kind, and that in the end, when one looks at the history of the press in France, where a lot of bande dessinée writers and artists have launched publications (subsequent generations have generally come out of the fanzine scene), that cartoonists need to take charge of things for themselves? I’m thinking of [René] Goscinny at Pilote, and auteurs like Fred at Hara-Kiri…

Cabu: I think that right now things are a lot easier for young cartoonists, with desktop publishing and computers. They can create a newspaper much more easily than we could: yesteryear, we did this with roneotype – you know, it was prehistoric stuff! But the main thing is to produce and sell a newspaper by oneself, even if it’s handwritten.

Tanitoc: This might be jumping way ahead, but could you say something about your current positions at Charlie hebdo and at Le Canard enchaîné? What is it, how do you see yourself, as a cartoonist, in your position as editor, for example in your choice of editorial matter? And what do your professional responsibili- ties consist of?

Cabu: At Charlie hebdo, I’m president of… what… what’s it called? [Laughter]

Tanitoc: You’ve forgotten the title printed on your business card?

Cabu: They gave it to me, because a title was needed, it’s rather… honorific! At Charlie, you know, the decisions are collective, even the choice of the cover is mostly collective. On Monday evenings, there are about 50 drawings on the wall, and everyone gives his or her opinion. Generally there’s a cover that emerges, that everyone likes. Otherwise, if there are several, its the editor-in- chief, Philippe Val, who casts the deciding vote. At Le Canard it’s not the same, because it’s in the hands of the journalists, who choose the drawings: we’re not there when the choice is made.

Tanitoc: You say ‘the journalists’, but I have to react to that, because you yourself have been a card-carrying journalist since…

Cabu: Since 1964: number 21,991. How about that! And on my card it says ‘cartoonist reporter’ [dessinateur reporter]. Very few cartoonists have a press card, 134 cabu because you have to prove that you focus on the news. It doesn’t give you a lot of privileges, contrary to common belief: it used to get us onto train platforms without having to buy a platform ticket, but now… We can get into certain museums…

Stimulating Encounters Tanitoc: Let’s get back to the 1960s: so you were working for L’Union de Reims…

Cabu: Yes and I was also already working for Hara-Kiri, from 1960. I had just returned from the Algerian War. I was lucky, I had encountered Fred at Ici Paris, while taking in my drawings, as I had done weekly, beginning in 1956. We hit it off well. One day he tells me: ‘I have a friend who wants to start up a newspaper. Do you want to join in?’ I said: ‘Okay, with you’. He introduced me to Cavanna.3 That’s the story. I was lucky, because it’s a trade where you’re mostly isolated, with each person at his or her drawing table, and from that point on, when I joined the team of Hara-Kiri, Reiser was already there. Topor was already there.4 So I had the benefit of an incredible opportunity to emulate others.

Tanitoc: There have been worse teams, that’s for sure. Can you say something about the ‘Mésaventures de Marie-la-lune’ [‘Misadventures of Loony Marie’]? (Fig. 1)

Cabu: Oh, yes, because ‘Marie-la-lune’ was a homeless person in Châlons – we said a hobo [clocharde], at the time, which was right – who lived in a garden shack, right behind my parents. She crisscrossed the town to pick up boxes, or tin cans, which she sold. I had made a ‘star’, one could say, out of her, because I had the ‘Misadventures of Loony Marie’ in L’Union de Reims. But after a while I realised that kids were throwing rocks at her, whereas I wanted people to take pity on this poor old lady. The fact that she was in the newspaper meant that she was on the receiving end of even more stones than before. So I stopped. That’s when I grasped the meaning of village idiocy [la connerie municipale]!

Tanitoc: I had been wondering whether you had ever given up defending anyone, as a cartoonist reporter. Your comics are pretty ferocious with the people you meet, on the whole. I would say that they don’t have a Robin Hood side to them…

3 Who encouraged him to go into the cabarets to do drawn reportage about popular singers, by giving him the rubric ‘Coin de nappe’ [‘Tablecloth corner’]. 4 Trans. note: Jean-Marc Reiser (1941–1983) was a satirical cartoonist from the Lorraine region. Roland Topor (1938–1997) was an artist of many talents: cartoonist, song-writer, script-writer, etc. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 135

Figure 1: ‘Les Mésaventures de Marie-la-Lune’ [‘The Misadventures of Loony Marie’], L’Union de Reims (1962)  Cabu. 136 cabu

Figure 2: ‘Lettre ouverte au ministre des anciens combattants’ [‘Open letter to the Minister of Military Veterans’]. The biting humour of this page, produced to a considerable degree by the contrast between the narrating textual voice and the visual narrative, should not prevent the reader from understanding that it superbly condenses and recounts the war-time experiences of Cabu in Algeria. Originally published in 1969, and reprinted in Cabu, Les Années 70 (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Vents d’Ouest, 2007)  Cabu. Trans. note: This page also supplies us with the genesis of Cabu’s beauf [‘redneck’] character – he is, first of all, a hard-nosed French army veteran of the Algerian War. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 137

Cabu: Sometimes I defend people, but I don’t think that we have a lot of power. Because people have been attacking stupidity for so long… Look, it’s been multiplied by ten, especially with all the television channels. So one has to remain modest. It’s not because one is defending someone that it helps out that person.

The Moral Tanitoc: I’m thinking again about your encounter with Jean-Marie Boëglin: you’ve talked about the impact, the importance that the Algerian War had for you, specifically for your anti-military stance, what you lived and saw down there (Fig. 2); you say that, ironically, this same Jean-Marie-Boëglin also ended up in Algeria during that period…5

Cabu: But facing me.

Tanitoc: On the other side. In the Jeanson network.6 You finally got together again in 1976, 1977, for a joint publication. Could you tell us a little bit more about this book, Ouvrez le massacre (La Démolition de Châlons) [‘Start the Massacre (The Demolition of Châlons)’]. Did all the material that you had accu- mulated during those town meetings serve as root soil for it? What form did the collaboration take?

Cabu: My pal Boëglin had not returned to Châlons, his hometown too – where his parents were still living – for 14 years... Because the putchist generals had been amnestied before […] the people, including him, who had assisted the FLN.7

5 As told in Cabu, Cabu passe aux aveux [‘Cabu Owns Up’], with Jean-Paul Tibéri (Paris: Jean-Cyrille Godefroy, 1990). 6 Trans. note: During the Algerian War, Francis Jeanson (1922–), a French philosopher close to Jean- Paul Sartre, organised a covert network of French supporters of the Algerian FLN (cf. below). The réseau Jeanson [‘Jeanson network’] helped FLN militants avoid arrest in France, and smuggled funds out of France, for deposit in Switzerland (part of the money was then used to buy arms for the FLN, to fight the French). This gave rise to their nickname of porteurs de valise [‘suit- case carriers’]. It took the French secret service (DST, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire [‘Direction of Territorial Surveillance’]) three years to track down the network, and when it finally succeeded in doing so (in 1960), it failed to catch Jeanson himself. Cf. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review Books, 2006; first ed. 1977), 237–238 and 416–417. 7 Trans. note: The putchist generals (Maurice Challe, Edmond Jouhaud, Raoul Salan and André Zeller) tried to wrest control of the French army from President De Gaulle in April 1961, because of the move towards Algerian independence. After the Algerian War (1954–1962), a series of French amnesty laws, enacted over several decades, eventually erased virtually all penalties and judge- ments against French government personnel (including the generals) and civilians who had taken part in illegal actions (e.g., rebellion, terrorism, torture, sabotage) against the French government and its agents during the War. The FLN is the Front de Libération Nationale [National Libera- tion Front], the primary Algerian nationalist organisation, which launched the insurrection on 1 November 1954. 138 cabu When he returned, it was a shock, obviously, because a mayor had destroyed half of the city to put up a shopping mall, which was always flooded because it was too close to the canal, the Mau. Construction work wasn’t moving forward; and in the meantime, a Carrefour hypermarket had opened on the outskirts of town, and had sucked out the whole downtown. All the stores clustered around it, just like in a lot of medium-sized cities in France. The downtown became a desert. We realised that a RPR mayor had done more harm to Châlons than the bombardments during the War,8 when the German army had demolished a neighbourhood. The things that we had lived through before stood us in good stead, because we had something to measure by: we had known a city that had been animated. There was economic censorship when five hundred copies of Ouvrez le massacre arrived: we didn’t know that the newsagent for the news- stand was a buddy of the mayor, from the same political party. He warned him. The mayor told him: ‘Okay, I’ll buy the lot!’ It had come out with Éditions du Sagittaire (a branch of Grasset). It took ten days for us to have books sent out again through another channel. But there was a moral to the story: finally, the mayor demolisher lost the elections and a Communist was elected! Imagine, in a city of civil servants, with a military base, what a traumatic event there had to have been, for a Communist to be elected! What I liked about the regional press, was that if you make a drawing that shocks people or that questions a local leader, you get feedback on it right away: people talk to you about it, they chew you out… whereas in our national papers, besides getting sued, you don’t often get feedback! There was a funny side, a very endearing one… We had the impression that we could have an impact on something.

Seventies Tanitoc: The Éditions Vents d’Ouest are publishing a series of books that bring together your work, decade by decade. The first volume, Les Années 70 [‘The Seventies’], has come out. How did you proceed, to select a portion of your countless works?

Cabu: I didn’t have a hand in putting the book together: it’s Alain David, a book series editor, who poked around in my attic. I let him do as he pleased, and by the way, I’m happy with the result. He’s preparing Les Années 80 [‘The Eighties’], and I wish him good luck! (Asked about this work, Alain David explained that: For Les Années 70, I thumbed through all of Charlie hebdo from 1969–1979. Begin- ning with about two thousand pages, I then made a purely subjective selection, trying

8 Trans. note: RPR, i.e. Rassemblement Pour la République [‘Gathering for the Republic’], a right- wing, Gaullist political party created in 1976, and absorbed in 2002 into a new political formation, the UMP (now the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire [‘Union for a Popular Movement’]). Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 139

to eliminate the anecdotal, although keeping some of it, and retaining the essential material. I had to eliminate a lot, and tried to focus on the beautifully done pages. It’s a personal vision of 1970s France, that of an opinionated author, who is leftist, paci- fist, a sixty-eighter [soixante-huitard],9 who likes lightheartedness and is curious about everything. And, I should add, is not sectarian.) Tanitoc: There are many double-pages, published in Hara-Kiri, then in Charlie hebdo.10 I was wondering about how you go about making them. You’ve said that you would go out on Tuesday and then return on Friday, for the wrap-up.

Cabu: Always at the end of the week. Now we do the wrap-up on Monday. What was interesting is that at that time I would stay with readers. I had a rubric entitled, ‘Invite me, and I’ll visit your home!’ I think it’s the only newspaper that would allow that. If I drew for Le Figaro, it would sure surprise me if I could stay in readers’ homes! I’ve sometimes slept in haystacks, or in piles of hay in barns, because I went to visit some communes [communautés]. A reader would tell me: ‘If you come visit me, you’ll have plenty enough to fill up a page!’ In the beginning, I looked through the subscribers’ list, to figure out to whom I should write. There was always someone who would answer me and invite me over.

Tanitoc: Did you have a special purpose? For example, before drawing these pages about the nuclear facility at Dampierre-en-Burly (Fig. 3), did you contact people?

Cabu: Yes, I had chosen the subject of nuclear power, because at the time people were talking about it a lot. There were a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations – furthermore, you can see what that produced: nothing at all. There needed to be a lot more people. The politicians said: ‘When you have 100,000 demonstrators or more, it’s worth an opinion poll’. Below that level they didn’t give a damn. That’s why small demonstrations aren’t worth anything; the large ones are.

Building the Narrative Tanitoc: Let’s talk about those comics reportages. In ‘Comment vivent les riches?’ [‘How Do the Rich Live?’], a reportage in Loir-et-Cher, where we meet a famous castle owner, there’s an obvious formal device: you build things up, and then we realise that it’s about Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was President then (Fig. 4). How did you go about building the narrative and organising the

9 Trans. note: Someone who participated in the student and worker uprising of 1968 in France; cf. below, the final section of the interview. 10 Hara-Kiri, which became Hara-Kiri hebdo in 1969 and disappeared one year later, having been banned by the Minister of the Interior after its famous headline: ‘Bal tragique à Colombey: 1 mort’ [‘Tragic Ball at Colombey: 1 dead’], after the death of General De Gaulle in his home in Colombey. On this subject see Jane Weston’s article in this issue of European Comic Art. 140 cabu

Figure 3: ‘Dampierre-en-Burly’, from Cabu, La France des beaufs (Paris: Éditions du Square, 1979)  Cabu. double-page? Did you think it through ahead of time? Did you draw the page on site, or in the train on your way home? Two days later?

Cabu: Yes, in the train I often found the thread of the story: that’s what you have to find. In a reportage you tell a little story, so it can’t be too disjointed. You need an angle. Sometimes I had one from the outset. Sometimes it didn’t Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 141

work at all, because I couldn’t draw it, so it wasn’t the right one! In any case, I make sketches on little slips of paper and then I put them together. That’s how I go about doing my reportages.

Tanitoc: What I find interesting, is that we do in fact have drawings made on site, based on your observation of the surroundings, and at times we have characters – which are your archetypes – who take charge and play a role: the bearded leftist, the redneck hunter [le beauf chasseur]… 142 cabu

Figure 4: ‘Comment vivent les riches?’ [‘How do the rich live?’], Cabu (1979), repub- lished in Les Années 70 [‘The 1970s’] (Issy-les-Moulineaux: Editions Vents d’Ouest, 2007)  Cabu. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 143

Cabu: I also encountered rednecks on site! But still, I shouldn’t… It’s not the best way of doing a reportage. Even if there are archetypes, one should reinvent them, one shouldn’t… You see, I’m being self-critical! One shouldn’t invent. One should reproduce reality. Reality is funny enough. One always wants to 144 cabu draw one’s characters: it’s so easy! But one shouldn’t do it too much. If you do reportage, you should translate what you see.

Influential Quills Tanitoc: Your drawings from that period – tell me if I’m wrong, because one always makes connections that aren’t necessarily pertinent – remind me of a certain number of cartoonists, specifically Searle, an Englishman, who, throughout the war, was held as a prisoner in a Japanese camp and risked his life to draw some extraordinary sketches of that experience...

Cabu: Ah yes, I’m familiar with those drawings. They really are very, very good.

Tanitoc: … and reportages like that of Hamburg, in the red-light district:11 they depict strip-teasers, clients, etc.

Cabu: Yes, yes. I don’t deny their influence. Ronald Searle was also a master, that’s for sure.

Tanitoc: Did you also read publications like The New Yorker?

Cabu: I would buy Punch,12 which was an English publication, not The New Yorker. Because it has a coldish humour. It’s true that it’s very, very British. I myself don’t use nonsense a lot: I’m surely French-ish [franchouillard] in that way!

Tanitoc: In 2003 you were in Nantes with Claire Bretécher for the exhibition dedicated to the Nantes cartoonist Jules Grandjouan (1875–1968).13 Had you been aware of his work?

Cabu: I was familiar with the issues of L’Assiette au beurre with his drawings.14 I’ve always admired Grandjouan, it’s true. His life is mysterious: why did he stop drawing… I don’t understand that very well.

Tanitoc: I think that in Grandjouan’s case, there was a kind of weariness. He was an unsuccessful candidate twice in legislative elections. After his Commu- nist commitment and then his expulsion from the Party, he had projects, a kind of utopia for the city of Nantes… In any case, I see a connection between your

11 This illustrator and great admirer of George Grosz was sent around the world from 1959 to 1969 by Frank Zachary, the artistic director of Holiday Magazine. 12 The satirical, illustrated weekly, remarkable also for its longevity (1841–1992, then 1996–2002). 13 In the museum of the castle of the Dukes of Brittany in Nantes, from 1 February to 11 May. 14 The journal – which was illustrated, libertarian and satirical – was published from 1901 to 1912. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 145

Figure 5: An image of the Ben Barka trial, drawn by Cabu for Le Figaro (1967)  Cabu.

respective work, whatever Jean Dutourd may think,15 beyond the fact that you both lost court cases over your antimilitaristic publications, especially because you and Grandjouan have been present at important trials: he at the retrial in the Dreyfus Affair, in Rennes, which he covered…

Cabu: That’s true, yes.

Tanitoc: …and also the fact that L’Assiette au beurre allowed him to rub shoul- ders, like you in your professional début, with some of the best-known artists in the profession: Caran d’Ache, Rabier, Delannoy…16

15 Both Cabu and Dutourd were invited by Bernard Pivot, on 9 December 1977, to participate in the French cultural television show Apostrophes, on the Antenne 2 channel. Dutourd had challenged Cabu, who had come to talk about his À Bas toutes les armées [‘Down With All Armies’], accusing the cartoonists of Charlie hebdo of not possessing the talent of the cartoonists of L’Assiette au beurre. 16 Trans. note: Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré; 1858–1909) is a famous Franco-Russian cartoonist, perhaps best known today for his (often anti-semitic) editorial cartoons on the Dreyfus Affair. He also worked extensively on a wordless comic book (Maestro), never published during his lifetime, and published many short, wordless comics. Benjamin Rabier (1864–1939) drew cartoons and comics, including ones about Gédéon le canard [‘Gideon the Duck’]. He also made animated cartoons and 146 cabu

Cabu: But he wasn’t an anti-Dreyfusard, like all the other cartoonists: Forain, Willette…17 All of them, except for Steilen and him.

Tanitoc: What experiences have you had in drawing cartoons at trials? In 1966, 1967, you were covering…

Cabu: The Ben Barka trial for Le Figaro (Fig. 5). But that was before Hersant, and I would never have done that under Hersant!18 I covered the trial for 45 days.

Tanitoc: In the press box…

Cabu: Yes, and you know, they never found his body. De Gaulle had said: ‘I want to know the truth’, but we never learned it. It was a trial that the Parisian elite came out to watch and be seen at [où le Tout-Paris a défilé]. A great trial.

Tanitoc: So there was a nice collection of individuals?

Cabu: Yes, it was ideal for drawing. I even saw Papon take the stand. He was Prefect of Police at the time, and he said that ‘everything was above board’ [‘tout était en règle’]!19

Tanitoc: Now your work is mainly that of a newspaper cartoonist: an image that comments on the news.

Cabu: Now there are young cartoonists at Charlie who are picking up the torch.

wrote plays. Aristide Delannoy (1874–1911) was a painter and cartoonist, who contributed anar- chist cartoons to various publications and was imprisoned for a pacifist caricature, depicting a French general (d’Amade) as a butcher, for his participation in the French military ‘pacification’ (i.e., conquest) of Morocco. 17 Adolphe Léon Willette (1857–1926) was likewise born in Châlons. In 1889 he ran as the ‘anti- semitic candidate’ [sic] in the legislative elections of Paris. Trans. note: Jean-Louis Forain (1852–1931) was a talented French cartoonist and painter. Swiss-born Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859– 1923) moved to Paris, where he worked as a cartoonist, illustrator and painter. 18 Trans. note: Robert Hersant (1920–1996) was a French media magnate. 19 Trans. note: Maurice Papon (1910–2007) was a high French government official who rose to become Minister of Finance under Prime Minister Raymond Barre. He is now best known for two state crimes in which he played a key role: sending Jews from the Bordeaux region to the Drancy concentration camp (where many died) in the Paris region, and from there to the Nazi death camps; as Prefect of Police for Paris, under President De Gaulle, he directed the police massacre (of dozens or hundreds), beatings and a vast roundup (of thousands) of Algerians during a mass demonstration organised by the FLN in Paris on 17 October 1961. He helped to cover up both of these crimes for many years, before he was finally tried and judged for crimes against humanity, for his role in the Nazis’ Final Solution. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 147

Figure 6: L’Incendie du 26 août 2005 dans le 13 arr. (M. Chevaleret)’ [‘The fire of 26 August 2005 in the 13th arrondissement (Metro station Chevaleret)’], from Cabu, Cabu et Paris (Editions Hoëbeke, 2006)  Cabu. Trans. note: This fire, possibly set by criminals, killed seventeen Africans, including fourteen children, and injured dozens of others. At the time of the fire 139 people, from several African countries (Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gambia), were living in the 1920s-era building located on boulevard Vincent Auriol. It was one of the worst French fires, in terms of deaths caused, since the end of the Second World War. The building was owned by the city of Paris and operated by an independent agency (France Euro Habitat), whose responsibility in the nature and spread of the fire has been investigated. It was one of three fires in Paris that same year that killed a total of 49 people, many of whom were African immigrant workers or their children. It sparked a major public debate and an effort by the government to provide better housing to vulnerable, working-class immigrant workers. 148 cabu Tanitoc: People like Luz…20 What do you think?

Cabu: It’s a good thing that they’re there. There’s also Riss,21 who’s very good. They have their own perceptions of things, and that’s very good. In Charlie hebdo one can do reportage, because no other newspaper gives a whole page to a cartoonist. From time to time there are attempts, but… It’s only in Charlie that one can do that (Fig. 6).

The Heart of the Subject Tanitoc: So let’s talk about the role, in reportage, of the film image, and of its supposed power in comparison with the drawn image. You look at the people you encounter with the acute eye of a cartoonist. I believe that you are very discreet in your way of going about your business, but do you encounter hostile or positive reactions, from people being drawn? Or do you work from memory after having taken notes directly?

Cabu: No, I always try to draw in front of the client! Someone who sees you scribbling is unnerved. Whereas if you bring in a movie camera, people don’t hold anything back; they let it all out. I’ve seen that for myself, because during the 1980s I participated in a television show entitled La Vie en face [‘Life on the Other Side’]: a one-and-a-half-hour reportage that aired around 11 p.m. There were three perspectives [regards]: the eye of a great photographer, there was a film director and there was a cartoonist. And we mixed it all together. It was montage, not live material. For example, we spent a week at Libé.22 A week in Villejuif, among the cancer patients. Obviously, there was preparatory work first. There were sick people, former smokers, who wanted to talk about their experience with tobacco, volunteers. And I made drawings against tobacco. I showed them to the sick person, in bed, ill with a smoker’s cancer, and who were close to the end, generally. If it made them laugh, we used the drawing! We did a report in the high security prison of Flins: we were in an inmate’s cell (furthermore, we were happy to get out in the evening!), and he didn’t want me to draw him – whereas in front of the TV camera, he told all: he had done a hold-up, anything we wanted, but the drawings, they bothered him! I don’t

20 Trans. note: Luz (Renald Luzier) is a satirical cartoonist who contributes to Charlie hebdo and has published several comic books as well. 21 Trans. note: Like Luz, Riss is a satirical cartoonist at Charlie hebdo who also publishes comic books. Like Cabu, Riss has covered French trials as a cartoonist reporter (see, for example, his book on the Papon trial). Photographing and filming trials is generally not allowed in France, whereas drawing or sketching them is accepted. 22 Trans. note: Libération, a newspaper founded by members of the French far left (Jean-Paul Sartre was a co-founder), is now a vaguely left-of-centre Parisian daily, struggling to stay afloat. Comics fans appreciate the special issue that the newspaper publishes on the Thursday of the annual French comics festival in Angoulême. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 149

Figure 7: ‘Cimetière de Leningrad’[‘Leningrad Cemetery’], from Cabu, Plutôt Russe que mort [‘Better Red than Dead’] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987)  Cabu.

Figure 8: ‘Une petite mendiante au jardin botanique de Calcutta’ [‘A young beggar girl in the botanical gardens of Calcutta’], from Cabu, Cabu en Inde [‘Cabu in India’] (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002)  Cabu. 150 cabu know why… It’s true that it bothers people when we draw while they’re watching us. You’ve surely observed that too. You can hide behind a movie camera, and there you can draw to your heart’s content. You’re not seen, they only see the camera, they’re only interested in that! Their 15 minutes of celebrity.

Tanitoc: Have you ever been sent out by a newspaper to cover a specific event? I’m thinking of that because I was again looking at images made by Grand jouan, who had been sent by L’Assiette au beurre, along with Florès and Delannoy, to cover the catastrophe in the Courrières mines (official toll: 1,099 dead, 562 widows, and 1,133 orphans).

Cabu: I don’t think that I’ve ever covered a catastrophe. I drew a bit for Le Matin de Paris [‘The Paris Morning’], for which I went to do a reportage with Jean-Paul Kaufman.23 Three days in the Nantes wine country, to find out whether Coluche would get his signatures.24 Kaufman, who was familiar with the region, told me: ‘We’re going to have some mayors who are pretty funny. I think that they’re going to give him their signature’. And in the end, after having been to 29 town halls in three days, none wanted to ‘give his signature to a clown’. That was commissioned work. Or some trials. But I didn’t cover the tsunami, or similar things. The most disheartening things were the military trials of conscien- tious objectors, which were always held in a military court. There were armed soldiers, who presented arms at the opening. That has a strange effect. It’s really... It’s frightening. Aside from that, I always try to keep my reportages in the realm of comedy (Figs. 7 and 8).

May 1968 Tanitoc: What struck me when I read La France des beaufs was that in the end not much has changed.25 Marchais is no longer with us,26 but we still find the

23 A journalist who unintentionally became famous in May 1985, when he was kidnapped in Lebanon along with the researcher Michel Seurat, by the Organisation de la Justice Révolutionnaire [Islamic Jihad Organisation]. 24 Trans. note: Coluche (Michel Colucci), born in 1944, was a stand-up comic and film actor who became a national folk hero, before he died in 1986 in a motorcycle accident. He launched himself as a candidate for the French presidency in 1981, but withdrew before the elections. Candidates for the presidency must obtain several hundred signatures of elected officials (including mayors) before they can be put on the national ballot. 25 A collection of reportages published by the Éditions du Square in 1979. Trans. note: Beauf [‘redneck’] is a term probably derived from beau-frère [‘brother-in-law’] and launched by Cabu’s comics and caricatures. 26 Trans. note: Georges Marchais (1920–1997) was a French trade unionist and politician, who rose through the ranks of the French Communist Party (PCF) and its trade union (the CGT) to become Secretary General of the PCF (1972–1994). He was a member of the French Parliament and was a candidate for French presidency. Humorists loved to poke fun at him, in part because of his colourful mannerisms and use of language. Interview of Cabu by Tanitoc 151 same well-known faces among the political personnel. And – is it funny or depressing? – a form of immobility, of inertia among people’s perceptions, in social choices, rituals, communal living habits…

Cabu: It’s true. You’re right. Things aren’t moving much.

Tanitoc: There’s perhaps a corresponding form of nostalgia. The two answer each other, periodically.

Cabu: The only moment when I really believed that we were going to change the world a little, was in 1968. I’m a sixty-eighter [soixante-huitard]. It’s a good memory for me, contrary to Sarkozy, who should reflect on things. Before 1968, a divorcé could never have been elected to the French presidency. He was already a divorcé before Cécilia left him. He would never have become president without May 1968. What has really changed a lot, in spite of it all, is the mindset of women, and the benefits that they have accrued since then. It’s normal, moreover, because they had to catch up from way behind. It’s May 1968 that made French society evolve a bit. I agree with you though: it hasn’t evolved much in spite of it all! ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’: An Interview with Anke Feuchtenberger

Interview conducted and edited by Mark David Nevins*

Abstract Anke Feuchtenberger is a German avant-garde cartoon artist (b. 1963) with a strongly caricatural style. In this interview she discusses her childhood and education in former East Germany, historical influences upon her – including Rodolphe Töpffer – and current inspiration, as well as creational techniques and work in progress. In a further section the artist provides direct analysis of several of her publications.

The earthy and organic drawings of Anke Feuchtenberger suggest fecundity and sensuality by means of images that recall the masterful draftsmanship of Goya or Rembrandt crossed with the solid and magical primitive physicality of African or Indonesian sculpture and masks. Her oneiric comics are at times peopled by half-human characters, who might belong to some subterranean race, and at other times inhabited by figures of impos- sible beauty and grace. Feuchtenberger’s stories tend to be closely controlled by an oddly detached narrative voice (only rarely making use of word balloons), Figure 1: Drawing titled ‘Old Rose and concern themselves with alienation, (Self-Portrait)’. Image later reproduced identity, sexuality, sexual politics, and the as a poster. borders between dreaming and waking, civilisation and the wild. Her drawings are striking and utterly unforgettable; the

* This interview was conducted over a series of months – beginning in person and continuing via e-mail. The interview was completed in late 2008.

European Comic Art 2.1 ISSN 1754-3797 (print) 1754-3800 (online) © Liverpool University Press 66 anke feuchtenberger comics themselves are virtuoso displays of narrative pace and timing; and she tells her stories with wit, irony and a probing feminine (rather than feminist) agenda that is tempered by the warmth of maternity. Feuchtenberger’s work is captivating, masterful, and perhaps the closest thing to the transcendental possibilities of lyric poetry that comics have yet given us. Born in 1963 in (East) Berlin, (East) Germany, Anke Feuchtenberger currently lives in rural eastern Germany and works in Hamburg, where she holds a professorship at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung. In addition to making comics, she draws (often on a very large scale with charcoal, in a way that resembles painting), makes etchings and prints, produces posters, and designs puppets and theatre sets. Her major comics publications (some of them created in collaboration with poet and writer Katrin de Vries) include Mutterkuchen [‘Afterbirth’] (1995); Der Kleine Dame [‘The Little Lady’] (1997); Somnabule (1998); Der Palast [‘The Palace’] (1999); Das Haus (2001); and three volumes in a ‘series’ about the character Die Hure H. [‘W. the Whore’], the first two of which have been translated into English: Die Hure H. (1996); Die Hure H. zieht ihre Bahnen [‘W. the Whore Makes her Tracks’] (2003); and Die Hure H. wirft den Handschuh [‘W. the Whore Throws the Glove’] (2007). Her work has been published in German, French, English, Spanish,and Finnish, and she has exhibited widely in Europe and beyond. Although not that of a caricaturist per se, Feuchtenberger’s work fits in well with the theme of this issue of European Comic Art. Like the best caricaturists (including Rodolphe Töpffer, whom she cites as an early and strong influence), Feuchtenberger is a master at evoking personality through expressive and repre- sentational strokes. Whereas many caricaturists – such as William Hogarth, or Feuchtenberger’s countrymen Otto Dix and George Grosz – depict their subjects’ character, personality or even psychology in their likenesses, Feuchtenberger might be said to aim to capture her characters’ and protagonists’ emotions, internal conflicts or interior states. As an artist and a storyteller, Feuchten- berger strives to understand her, and our, emotions, hopes and fears through the power of the crisp and the smudged line.

Nevins: How would you describe your goals or ambitions as an artist? Do you have any sort of ‘manifesto’ Figure 2: Illustration, published in Lo or mission or philosophy? Straniero [‘The Outsider’], 2005. ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 67

Feuchtenberger: From the beginning of my time as an artist I felt a very strong resistance, almost physical, when I felt like I had to do something, or when someone asked or required me to do something that I was not myself convinced about. It felt like being ill when I was sitting in front of a piece of work that seemed to be stupid or senseless to me. I think this has something to do with my experience growing up in the DDR [ former East Germany], where in my childhood I often saw that people were not connected with what they were doing. They did what they did because otherwise they would have problems with the Party or other officials. Since those days I swore to myself that I would not do any artistic work where I felt such a disconnection. I prefer to do other kinds of work to earn money, which I have done in the past – such as cooking for children in the local Kindergarten, or teaching like I’m doing now. My approach to my drawing may therefore seem luxurious or unprofessional. But I see these same problems in the work of other artists – the signs of routine – and I think to myself, ‘Drawings can’t lie!’ Nevins: When did you first realise that you wanted to be an artist? And what were your earliest experiments with making art? Feuchtenberger: Well, I grew up in East Berlin, in a house full of art books. My father was a graphic designer, and my mother was an art teacher. So rather than children’s books, I spent a lot of time looking at art books. These were strange books for a five-year-old girl, things like the posters of John Heartfield, books about Käthe Kollwitz and Rodolphe Töpffer, and collections of paintings from the Italian Renaissance. My father had a lot of catalogues from the ‘Poster Biennales’ in Warsaw and Finland, and I loved to look at those posters. I also really liked the work of some of the Renaissance painters, especially Matthias Gruenewald and Hieronymus Bosch. Those images filled my imagination every day. Figure 3: Drawing, published in Lo Straniero, 2005. 68 anke feuchtenberger My first idea about art was that I wanted to be a dancer: a Russian folk dancer. I was actually sad because, even though I was going to a ballet school, I knew I could never become a Russian dancer… because I was German! So early on I painted and drew a lot of Russian dancers, especially women. And I began to understand that through art I could substitute fantasy for a desire – that I could live in a world that was not this world, but a fantasy world. I came to understand this fact very early in my life, and I have never stopped drawing. I find it hard to say, really, when I started drawing, since I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. One of my early very serious experiences with art came when I was 15 years old. I got up all my courage and visited a female painter I adored, and I showed her my drawings. Her name is Nuria Quevedo. She’s Spanish, and was in exile in East Germany. She taught me some very important things, which I have never forgotten. Even more than about painting, she talked to me about men and women, and what she said has stayed with me. Another important experience, also when I was around 15, was that I became friends with a couple of sculptors who were about ten years older than I was. We worked together a lot in their studio, and I learned a great deal from them. This period of my life was a time of great learning and change for me. Nevins: Where did you live in Berlin, and what was it like growing up there before the Wall came down? Feuchtenberger: I lived in several different neighbourhoods. The very first was near Weissensee, and it was a green place, with gardens. In the ’60s there were still some horses and cows in people’s backyards. They needed horses to carry coal for the ovens. The second place I lived was in Leninplatz. We lived on the eleventh floor, and I could look down on Lenin and all over Berlin, even over into West Berlin. I liked living up high because of the beautiful views. Later, with my son, I lived in Mitte, on Sophienstrasse, in the old Jewish Quarter of Berlin. I really liked the area. From there I eventually left Berlin to move into West Germany, after the Wall came down. Nevins: You were trained as an artist in the DDR [East Germany]. What was that education like? Feuchtenberger: I first started my studies in evening classes at the Akademie, when I was 15 years old, and I did that for four years, three times a week after school. Then I took up an internship in a photography studio for two years, and then I studied graphic design for five years to take my Diplom. For my Diplom project I chose to focus on the Russian (Soviet) Film Festival, so I made a lot of film posters, portraits of Russian actors, and theatre costumes. In addition to all that, I also studied sculpture through private tutorial with a professor. My education was a very good one, I think, because it gave me the time and opportunity to study things that were not strictly graphic design, ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 69

Figure 4: Poster created for a women’s shelter, 1993. even though my course of study was graphic design. In my development as an artist, physical space and the body became impor- tant subjects, and I think that’s due at least in part to my sculptural work. I have been influenced a great deal by all kinds of sculpture: from African art and masks, to Egyptian sculpture, to Asian art and masks, and even to a large extent by Michelangelo’s sculpture. Nevins: Are there any other artists whose work may have influenced yours? I wonder if you resonate at all with Picasso, Gerhard Richter, or maybe Kiki Smith or Raymond Pettibon? Feuchtenberger: Well, I don’t really like Picasso or Richter, and I never saw Rich- ter’s work before the Wall came down. I was exposed to the work of Pettibon and Smith only pretty recently – say four or five years ago. By the time I saw their work I was already very firmly established in my own ways and style, so I wouldn’t say that they had much influence on me. One very important influence for me could be Jiri Trnka, though I would be surprised if many people know his work. One other significant influence for me, and someone I really admired as an artist in my early life, is Rodolphe Töpffer. There are also some East German painters who were the teachers of Neo Rauch: Heisig and Matheuer. And then all of my life the Renaissance painter Paolo Ucello as well as Goya and Rembrandt have been very important to me. 70 anke feuchtenberger

Figure 5: Drawing titled ‘Aufdringliche Liebe’ [‘Mighty Love’], from Wenn mein Hund stirbt mach ich mir eine Jacke [‘When My Dog Dies I’ll Make Myself a Jacket’] (Hamburg: Kiki Post, 2005).

Nevins: So when did you become interested in comics? Did you read comics when you were young and want to make your own? Or, perhaps let me add another dimension to this question: is it fair to call you a ‘comics artist’? Do you think of your narrative work as ‘comics’? Feuchtenberger: Growing up in the DDR we didn’t really have comics. Well, there was one, but I didn’t get it so often. It was called Mosaik, drawn by someone named Hegen, and it featured three characters who travelled to different histor- ical times and had adventures. But I didn’t like that comic, because it didn’t seem beautiful to me. At that time I was searching for beauty – in houses, animals, women, men – and didn’t have much interest in a comic with a strange gnome- like character who had a nose like a potato! Anyway, in terms of comics early on, for me there was really only Rodolphe Töpffer, whom I discovered when I was five. The first modern-day comics I read came much later, after the Wall came down and I was in my mid-twenties. These were primarily things like the comics of Mark Beyer and Jacques de Loustal and some of the other interesting comics produced in the 1980s. By that time, I was working primarily for the theatre: making posters, costumes and puppet shows, and generally doing illustrations and drawings ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 71

Figure 6: Panels from Don Quijote (Madrid: Sins Entido, 2005). 72 anke feuchtenberger based on my imagination and works of literature. I had a fair amount of diffi- culty working and collaborating with actors and directors, and I discovered that through comics I could tell the stories I wanted to tell without having to compromise. Now, I don’t really know about the word ‘comic’… I think that I do like to tell stories, even in my ‘freer’ work like large drawings. In German I call what I do ‘Bilderzählung und erzählende Bilder’ [‘pictorial narratives and narrative pictures’], an expression recalling the older German word for ‘comics’ Bilder­ geschichte, and that sounds old-fashioned enough for me. However, in recent years I’ve started to read more comics, because I get a lot of stuff from friends all around the world. I do think my own work is becoming even more narrative. I don’t like to limit or constrain my ideas about the Bilderzählungen – I don’t like to ‘shoehorn’ them – because I like to discover new ways to tell stories with pictures. And when I have to think about what my ‘place’ in the medium or history of comics is… well, that becomes kind of claustrophobic for me. More recently I find that I’m being inspired by old American comics from the forties. I’ve started to draw big drawings inspired by them, but in really exaggerated sizes – like 1.5 metres by 2 metres. For sure these are not comics, but they do tell stories and even sometimes have word balloons. Nevins: You say your friends send you comics. Are there any recent comics, say from the last five years, that have really impressed or intrigued you? Feuchtenberger: I like the work of the young Finnish artist Marko Turunen quite a bit, and also the work of the Israeli group, Actus, especially all of the recent work by Rutu Modan. I’m interested in the work of the Japanese artists, Tsuge and Nakazawa, which I have only recently discovered, as well as Hok Tak Young from Hong Kong, and Yan Cong, a very young Chinese artist. I’m also excited about the work of the Finnish-Italian Amanda Vähämäki and the young Italian, Michelangelo Setola, as well as a few of my students, including Arne Belstorf, Sascha Hommer and Birgit Weyhe. Many of the artists who most interest me right now are very young and very, very talented, and I think they have great futures! Nevins: And which particular comics from the forties are most interesting to you? Feuchtenberger: Well, I can’t tell you that I like to read the stories in the comics from the forties, but I find myself very inspired by some of the images. Single panels really interest me, so much that I sometimes steal them to create a new image in a different context. For example, there is a wonderful ‘Brainface’ story by Bernard Baily. Baily drew The Spectre, I think, for Jerry Siegel, in More Fun Comics or Action Comics. I don’t know anything about Baily and I can’t really say ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 73 that he is a wonderful draughtsman, but I take inspiration from strange images like that. Sometimes ‘mistakes’ in drawings are more interesting to me than a truly brilliant drawing. I was also struck by an image of a crying Captain Marvel Jr. by Mac Raboy, and of course the strange and wonderful Plastic Man by Jack Cole. But I find these images by chance, and with my poor English I can’t tell you a lot about the stories themselves! Here is another way, maybe, of talking about what inspires me. When I was little, I found that I could squint and by doing that change the perspective of things. For example, I could squint to change the position of a teacher during a boring lesson. This was a stupid game, but being able to shift space by a few millimetres was a mind-opening experience for me. Now, when I look at photos, drawings, paintings, or even things like these old superhero comics, I look at them with my ‘squint’. In doing so, I think I am often able to see some- thing besides the printed reality or the intention of the artist. What I see is like a second meaning to the image, and I don’t have to do too much to see it, just shift things a few millimetres. And in doing so I am able to open up my own imagination, and my own fantasies, which leads me into a deeper experience of connection – connection with my own life experiences, the experiences of other people, history, psychology… Does this make sense?

Figure 7: Charcoal on canvas titled ‘Du Schwein’ [‘You Pig’], from wehwehweh. superträne.de [‘www.supertear.de’] (Quilow: MamiVerlag, 2008). 74 anke feuchtenberger Nevins: Of course! I used to do the same thing when I was young and bored in class. It’s mesmerising, but I never thought of using it to create art! Now, speaking of the classroom, in addition to being an artist, you are also an instructor of art. What is that like? How much of your time does the job require, and what are your responsibilities? Feuchtenberger: I have the rare opportunity (in Germany at least) to teach the making Figure 8: Panel from Hero und Leander (Zurich: of comics as well as illustra- Edition Moderne, 2004). tion and drawing. I’m very happy with my work as a teacher, because I meet and work with so many young and talented people. I am constantly having interesting and inspiring discussions, and in teaching these subjects I am always learning more about them. I think I must be somewhat successful as a teacher, because some of my students are already publishing, and we have done some wonderful exhibi- tions, not only in Germany but also in other European countries. Also, it seems that comics have become more a part of the ‘cultural ambience’ in Hamburg, which I know is in large part due to these students. Sometimes the job is hard, however, because it can become so demanding and intense that I totally lose contact with my own work. In order to have longer uninterrupted periods, I have taken to drawing on weekends and during school breaks. I’m personally strong enough to manage both jobs, but it’s a good thing we have holidays from school, that’s for sure. Nevins: How do you consider being a teacher in light of your career as an artist? Feuchtenberger: Well, I will never stop doing my own work because of my job as a professor. The fact that I continue to draw, and stay active in the art scene, is very important to my students: they trust me because I know what I’m talking about. As a teacher, I always like to connect the work with reality– I’m not a ‘theoretical’ professor. And as an artist, I am constantly learning from my work as a teacher – learning new things, seeing things differently, and being inspired by my students. ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 75

Nevins: I know it’s probably not fair to ask an artist ‘What does your work mean?’, but I wonder if you could tell us a little about what you are trying to do with your artwork. What motivates you? Are there specific questions you are trying to explore? Feuchtenberger: Actually, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask that – I think it is a beautiful question! The first of all the reasons why I draw is that drawing gives me a great deal of pleasure. It fulfils me in a way that simply makes me happy. At the same time, to draw is to learn about measures: the measure of the body, the scale of human beings, the space for love and contact, the size of life. This may sound silly, but my motto is ‘Pathos und Peinlichkeit’ [‘Pathos and Embarrassment’]. Or else, ‘Aus dem Land, wo die Sprechblasen Schatten werfen’ [‘From the Land where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’]. It is through drawing that I allow myself to take the time and energy to recon- struct, prove, and analyse my experiences, and to connect them with an uncon- scious part of myself (which I believe is the part connected to the universe) through my hand and my body. To do this is to do something, finally, that I can’t fully control. When I am drawing I need the right setting and atmosphere for concentra- tion and analysis, as well as some space for fantasy, which I believe is necessary to truly get into contact with other people. It’s all about communication. My body is working: I tend to draw in large formats, so I am physically engaged in the drawing, and when I’m working in this way it’s like dancing around the picture. And this act is also a pleasure, because it’s not only drawing with the fingers and the brain. Drawing for me is also the fulfilling of desires which I can’t satisfy in my ordinary life: to visit strange places, to see a special light, to create moving situations or dangerous situations, and yet to keep myself safe and secure so that afterwards I’m still alive. As I said, drawing for me means communication. I like your question, because I would like to communicate with and through my work. I’m not really concerned if someone ‘likes’ my work or not. It’s more inter- esting to me to discuss impressions, because I believe that every person has a very special expression of life, Figure 9: Untitled drawing from Wenn and the dignity and right to express it mein Hund… (Hamburg: Kiki Post, 2005). 76 anke feuchtenberger in his or her special way. I’m very curious about that. If I draw a new story, it’s like a long trip where I don’t know where I will finally arrive, and how I must change when I get there. When I work with texts written by Katrin de Vries, the texts are not a street. Rather, her text is like a little angle for me, which helps me to feel more self- secure because we stay in perma- nent communication (through the work, not in reality). In my work I see a purpose to Figure 10: Panel from Die Hure H. zieht ihre speak about special things, expe- Bahnen (Zurich: Edition Moderne, 2004). riences of life, and to do my very best to play as well as possible the instrument that was given to me. I have to share the pleasure, just like I share the pleasure when someone is able to cook a good soup or is making a beautiful table or writing a beautiful novel. Pleasure for me means not only beauty, or a particular idea of beauty. The world is so rich, that I would like to learn about all the different expressions of life, some of which can also be ugly or painful. Drawing also helps me to look at the ugly or painful things, and in my drawings I try to measure the possibilities and communicate some of what I discover. Nevins: What are you most excited about working on right now – and where do you think you will be focusing your energy in this new year of 2009? Feuchtenberger: I started the year making the transparencies for several silk- screen images. Silkscreen is an old artform for me, and one I really like a lot because it’s so risky, drawing on transparencies with just one ugly colour, and trying to imagine that from there a picture will come out, with a lot of different brilliant colours which will all work nicely together and fit the original idea. From time to time I begin to have a strong need or desire for colours after working for a long time with only black and white. Right now I’m writing a longer story, which is very exciting for me because I found that there was a lot for me to discover during the writing of it. The story is inspired by some of my experiences with fungi. The old house we are reno- vating is full of fungi, in the forest, in the body… wherever. My partner Stefano said that perhaps fungi is the real god: it’s not an animal and not a plant. I have tried to connect this idea with some kind of thrilling story that takes place here ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 77

Figure 11: Charcoal on canvas titled ‘Wilhelm Busch’, from wehwehweh.superträne.de (Quilow: MamiVerlag, 2008).

in Vorpommern, where we are living now. This is a place lost in the eastern part of Germany, where the past, with its socialist organisation of life, can still be felt, and where nature is overgrowing a lot of workplaces because many people have left these places to move into cities in the west. As you can see, all of my books tend to be different. Every time I make a book I try to draw with different materials and explore different concepts. For this book I decided I would like to return to a more simple kind of drawing, and a more narrative one. My latest book, titled wehwehweh.supertraene.de, collects all my large charcoal drawings. These large drawings were more like dreams captured in single pictures, much more visually oriented. But now I have the burning desire to return to narrative and put my very own language to use in storytelling.

Postscript: Anke Discusses Some of Her Books Das Haus (2001) Created as a weekly comic strip for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Das Haus is a series of six-panel vertical strips that explore, in the artist’s own personal language of symbols, the architecture of the human body and the workings of language. Constructed of images reminiscent of Renaissance etchings, Mexican 78 anke feuchtenberger

Figure 12: 12a, cover of Das Haus (Berlin: Reprodukt, 2001); 12b and 12c, images from Das Haus. ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 79 loteria cards, or Surrealist collages, the strips invite yet defy explication, and furthermore shift the work of creating meaning directly to the reader, who is engaged in trying to unlock the highly elusive and allusive accompanying texts. On the book’s cover is a drawing of the Tower of Babel, which stands as both a challenge and a warning to those who pick it up.

Feuchtenberger: This book came out of an assignment from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to produce a daily strip. I was interested in doing something about Berlin, the place where I grew up, because the strip was intended for the Berlin section of the FAZ. I wanted to make something based on my memories of Berlin, and especially to explore a belief I have that memories are deposited in the body. Therefore, according to my theory, if you touch a part of the body it will produce memories that are connected to a certain place. At the same time, I see architecture as a space with different levels of meaning: sacred, historic, social, etc. But I also dream of architecture as something similar to anatomy. So in Das Haus I have created a key, which is a part of the body that opens the house and the memories. Some of these memories are very personal, some of them are historic – but in every case they repre- sent a point of view I have on my hometown. wehwehweh.superträne. de [‘www.supertear.de’] (2008) Carrying what appears to be a URL as its title, this collection of images was produced to accompany the exhibits of Feuchten- berger’s large (some as big as 2 metres by 2 metres) charcoal drawings at the Arte Contemporanea in Modena, Italy, and at the Galerie Kolja Steinrötter Figure 13: Charcoal on canvas titled ‘Sprung zurück’ in Münster, Germany. [‘Jump Back’], from wehwehweh.superträne.de (Quilow: MamiVerlag, 2008). 80 anke feuchtenberger Feuchtenberger: During this interview I have talked about how I have been very inspired by American comics of the 1940s. While working with some of these images I created the protagonist Super Tear (‘tear’ as in teardrop), which ended up being a mind-broadening area of exploration for me. The result was a collection of around 27 large charcoal drawings, which are reproduced in the book. Based on this book and five others, we started to build up our own little publishing house. We make very small editions of beautifully produced books. Stefano and I are both a little bibliophilic in that way: we like carefully produced books that are not expensive. And I have always been so impressed that as a teacher I’m a partner in making so many wonderful works by the students, that it would be sad if the dummies of the books made for the students’ Diploms just disappeared in some bookshelf. So we founded MAMIVERLAG as a place to publish books that we really love, including the work of some of my students

Die Hure H. (1996) /W. the Whore (2001) Die Hure H. zieht ihre Bahnen (2003) /W. the Whore Makes Her Tracks (2006) Die Hure H. wirft den Handschuh (2007) Die Hure H., or ‘W. the Whore’, is the main character in three books created

Figure 14: Cover of the original edition of Die Hure H. (Berlin: Jochen, 1996; the book has since been published in a new edition by Reprodukt of Berlin). ‘From the Land Where the Word Balloons Throw Shadows’ 81 by Feuchtenberger in collaboration with the poet Katrin de Vries. The first two books have been published in English editions, translated by this article’s interviewer. All of the books pursue what might be called feminist lines of inquiry: what is a woman’s worth?; how is that valued?; what does it mean to be a woman?; and who gets to decide what it means? The ‘voice’ of Die Hure H. is de Vries’s, and Feuchtenberger deftly juxtaposes images with her poetic texts to create additional layers of meaning and ambivalence – the books are much more than illustrated poems, and in fact Die Hure H. makes a strong case for the potential of comics as multivalent visual poetry.

Feuchtenberger: Die Hure H. was intended to be a very open character. She was created with the poet Katrin de Vries. Her name should create fantasies about danger, pleasure, sexuality, and so on. We used the character as a door which opens up wide possibilities for thinking about the female body, the history of the female body, and the opportunities for a woman in society (yes, this sounds like a big agenda!). Die Hure H. is not intended to be a homogeneous or stable fictional biography. As a character she is always changing, and in the drawings I try to illuminate different aspects of life.

Wenn mein Hund stirbt mach ich mir eine Jacke [‘When My Dog Dies I’ll Make Myself a Jacket’] (2005) This book is a gorgeous collection of works on paper – charcoal, pastel, wash and mixed media – created between 2003 and 2005. Much more than just a sketchbook or gathering of drawings and studies, Wenn mein Hund stirbt… offers a gaze into the well of Feuchtenberger’s ideas and imagination, and also serves as a testament to her skill and fluency as an artist. This collection could stand, admirably, as the fruit of two busy years for any serious artist; what is remarkable is that it was a ‘side project’ for Feuchtenberger, created during the time she was not devoting to at least five book-length works and a full teaching load.

Feuchtenberger: This title was invented early one morning in the mountains in Italy, when my dog came onto my bed to wake me up. And I was so much in love with her that, still half-sleeping, I had this strange sentence in my head, ‘When my dog dies, I’ll make myself a jacket’, because I couldn’t imagine being without her one day. My feeling was not cynical or pessimistic – rather, it was an attempt to express a feeling of pure love. Like a mother would like to eat her beloved baby (some mothers know this feeling of strong dolcezza). But afterwards, thinking about it more, the sentence seemed to me to be very ambivalent, and I liked that because it creates different kinds of impres- sions or images. For example, during the horrible time of Nazi Fascism, when the surviving sons and daughters took up the houses and clothes of their dead 82 anke feuchtenberger parents. And also, I created a lot of the drawings in this book by looking at other drawings – which means I was making use of something that belonged to someone else. This is not simply copying or plagiarising, because during my creation of the drawings I made so many changes that nobody would ever recognise the original sources. Now, part of the impetus here was also that, a few years ago, I suffered from some plagiarism of my own work in Europe. This was hard for me to Figure 15: Untitled drawing from Wenn mein deal with, and also the fact that Hund… (Hamburg: Kiki Post, 2005). some people were earning good money imitating my style, but making it ‘cuter’. I was never able to make a lot of money with my style. Also, a few journalists claimed that some of my students’ work looked too much like mine, and that I was somehow responsible for that. Of course, that’s absurd, because I am happiest when my students find their own way, their own style, and I’m always pushing them to do that. So, I thought to myself – well, why don’t I do a little plagiarising? I meant this as a kind of joke, of course, in response to some of what I have been describing, but I thought it could also be an interesting experiment. So the book Wenn mein Hund stirbt… is a collection of sketches and free drawings that I have made between the more ‘serious’ work of my picture-stories. I find drawing this way liberating and inspiring. Some of the drawings are quite large: 50 centime- tres by 50 centimetres. The black drawings are illustrations I had done for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Then, when my partner Stefano Ricci’s latest book was printed, he carefully measured the space on the printing plates and realised that there would be some empty space just perfect for me to print a little book of these drawings. Which means that nobody had to pay for the book, and in fact it was made using the extra paper that would have normally gone into the garbage. Stefano is a genius in printing, and so this book was a present, and I was very happy about it because in the world of comics publishing nobody ever wants to publish a book of just drawings and sketches unless the artist is someone very famous like Chris Ware. After the book was printed, my gallery in Italy and a new publishing house set up by some of my former students decided to distribute it. Interview with Joost Swarte Ann Miller

Abstract Joost Swarte, the Dutch comic artist, designer and architect, and inventor of the term ligne claire [‘clear line’], played a major role in the conception of the new Hergé museum at Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. The museum website (http://www. museeherge.com) has details of the rooms and exhibits, and includes an explanation from Swarte about his role as scenographer. In this interview with European Comic Art, he further elaborates some of the points made in that text, and sheds interesting light upon issues raised by contributors to this volume.

Miller: My first question is about the work of the scenographer. Obviously a lot of people were involved in this project, including the architect. How does the scenographer work with them? Swarte: The first thing was that Fanny Rodwell got in contact. She invited the architect, Christian de Portzamparc, to work as an architect on the project. This was after negotiations with the town of Louvain-la-Neuve, who very much wanted a cultural impulse in their community. This town was built in the seventies and it is a university town. Do you know its history, and why it’s called Louvain-la-Neuve? It’s because, previously, the university in Leuven was French speaking, but it was now in a Flemish speaking part of the country. In the late sixties, early seventies, the students protested against this, so the result was that the university became Flemish and so the French-speaking professors and students had to move. So a whole new university was built for them, as well as a town, and they called it Louvain-la-Neuve. Architecture-wise, it’s interesting. It’s maybe not especially beautiful at first sight, but if you know how it’s built, with the different layers of concrete where the traffic can go under the city centre and goods can be delivered to shops through concrete tunnels, you can see that it’s an interesting approach. Anyway, this town needed a cultural impulse and was willing to co-operate

European Comic Art 3.2 (2010) doi:10.3828/eca.2010.16 210 joost swarte fully with the Studios Hergé to make this museum a reality. They offered a site on the edge of town, in park-like surroundings, and this very much appealed to the Studios Hergé, and they decided the Museum would be founded in Louvain-la-Neuve. Now at that time they first got in touch with the architect and he carried out volume studies to see what size of museum could be built for the budget. Just after that, I was invited by Fanny and Nick Rodwell to come and talk about the scenario. There were two essential stages, first the scenario and then the scenography. They asked me ‘Could you write a scenario for the museum?’ That is to say ‘Could you, looking at the collection that we have, think about what to show and how to show it?’ I needed some extra expertise in this field, so two more people were invited to form a team. One was Philippe Goddin: he was Hergé’s secretary a long time ago and he is the author of the official biography of Hergé, and he has also produced these very substantial books: the Chronologie d’une oeuvre [‘The Art of Hergé’].1 So he knows the whole contents of the collection. He was an impor- tant man for me. The other one was Thierry Groensteen, and he is the former director of the Musée de la Bande Dessinée et des Images in Angoulême. So he knows all about how museums work. This is important expertise to have on board. So we met regularly in Brussels and discussed how we would like to have the museum filled: how many rooms we needed, how you start. We wanted not just to start in the first room with information, but to do something before that. The people who come are expecting something, and if you don’t fulfil some of their expectations and you just start with ‘Hergé was born on this date etc., etc. ...’, that wouldn’t be good. So we started with the first room, we call it an anteroom. It’s just a room where you see some portraits of Hergé and presenta- tions of his main characters. People feel at home, they know they’re in the right museum. Then you go through into the first room. We came to the conclusion that nine rooms for the museum would be best: three that were informative, and then three around the themes arising out of the drawings, and then again three showing works. So this was the organi- gramme [‘organisational chart’] that we designed for the museum. Anyway, all our wishes were put in a report and this report became part of the cahier des charges [‘set of protocols’]. This is what you send to an architect to inform him of what you want. There is of course a technical cahier des charges, and what we sent was the artistic cahier des charges. This was sent to the architect, and then he started designing the building around this scenario. It’s very nice to have the museum purpose-built around your ideas for the presentation of the exhibits. It’s not always the case – it can happen that an architect has his own vision, and

1 Philippe Goddin, Hergé: Chronologie d’une œuvre, Vols 1–6 (Tournai: Éditions Moulinsart, 2004– 2008). Interview 211 afterwards you design exhibitions for that building. But this was the other way round – the content was agreed first, and then the architect started to work. He didn’t encounter any problem with it, and he said to me that he never had such a fully-detailed project before starting, and it helped him a lot to give direction to the building. After this stage was completed, I was asked to be involved in a second stage, and that was the design of the interior of the permanent exhibition. And for that I cooperated with a man called Winston Spriet. He is famous in Belgium for mounting amazingly beautiful exhibitions, temporary exhibitions but also museum presentations. He was, for instance, the exhibition designer of the Museum of Musical Instruments in the centre of Brussels and of the Magritte Museum. So he knows a lot about lighting, the best producers of display cases, he has a lot of experience in these areas. So this made things easy. What I do is I try to think how it feels to be in the museum as a visitor, so I transform myself into a visitor, and I try to inform myself as well as possible by doing that. And I then translate this into sketches. So I made my sketches, and then in negotiation with Winston Spriet we came up with all the detail in the different museum rooms. So those are the two main stages that I was responsible for. I wanted to tell you something else that occurred to us while we were organ- ising the museum. We had the idea that, in one of the rooms, we would have an ethnographic museum. That would fit very well with some of the things in the books. So we wrote to several museums in Belgium, trying to get some material for this presentation, like African masks. They were willing to lend works, but only for a limited period. And we obviously expect the museum to continue for longer than four months. I thought of another solution for this. I remembered that I had once visited a collector of 3D photographs of the early twentieth century. Not only did I want to show additional exhibits in this ethnographic museum, but I wanted them to have the impact that reading Hergé had on me when I was young: the same effect that Hergé had on many children, who felt that they were travel- ling across the world with Tintin. Now in our time, computers have arrived, and every child can see any part of the world through the internet, so the same effect cannot be replicated. But I remembered these 3D photographs, and I visited the collector and I asked him if he had photos of old Shanghai or Tibet or the pyramids in Egypt, and a few other subjects, and he started looking. He came up with some beautiful 3D photos. Now, we have 3D photo machines in this room in the museum and if you look at them, the old cultures come alive like magic. So that was an extra element that we included in this hall. To add something else, I called the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. They have two important objects that played a role in the Tintin stories. One is the Mummy of Rascar Capac2 and the other one is the Arumbaya fetish, the

2 Hergé, Les 7 Boules de cristal [‘The Seven Crystal Balls’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1948). 212 joost swarte wooden statue from The Broken Ear.3 And I asked them: ‘Could I come to your museum and make a special 3D photo of these two objects?’ And they agreed, so we created a special installation, isolated from the rest of the collection, and we produced these 3D photos for it. We enlarged them to life size, and I asked the architect to make two fake door entrances which had concealed lighting. At the back of each recess, we glued 3D photographs of the objects, blown up to the size of the doors. And if you look through 3D spectacles it’s almost as if there’s another room behind the ethnographic hall, another room with the real Rascar Capac or the real Arumbaya fetish. Miller: Do you see any specific issues being involved in displaying comic art as opposed to other kinds of artworks? Swarte: Well, what I thought was important is to not present these works of Hergé as if it was art made to be hung on a wall. What I thought was impor- tant first of all, was not to hide the borders of the art, but to show the full page. Normally in the frame you have a passe-partout [‘mounting paper’] and this hides things, tidies them up, but I think comic art is the result of work, and it’s made for reproduction. And I love to see the borders – the artist’s thumbprints may be on the paper, etc., etc. So you can see the fun of the drawing process and you can feel how it was to have this original raw drawing. It could be inspiring for people too, and as far as the lighting of the work is concerned, I prefer to avoid flat lighting, because it stops you from seeing the surface of the paper. It’s better to floodlight it with a source almost parallel to the surface of the paper, so you can also see where the artist had drawn a line before, but erased it, etc. This can be very clearly seen: I think that’s important. And another thing is that I preferred to have table display cases rather than frames on the wall. Now frames on the wall enable more people to view the exhibits at the same time, but if you also have table display cases, then the experience is more like reading a book. And the work of comic artists is meant for a one-to-one relationship between the author and reader, so I wanted to preserve something of this in the presentation of the works. And of course we encountered a problem concerning the lighting levels. And that’s a conservation issue. So we were advised that more than 50 lux would be bad for the works, for their conservation. Any artwork on paper will degrade over time, but if we can slow down this process, we prefer to do so. So we have respected this 50 lux limit, and it occurred to me that if you have the 50 lux directly on the work, and if the surroundings are a bit darker, in fact the eyes of the viewer will open and the effect of the exhibited work will be as if it is in full light. So that also helps. And we took an additional measure to help conservation: we selected three parallel exhibitions. One exhibition is shown for four months, and after four months it is replaced by another one, and the

3 Hergé, L’Oreille cassée (Tournai: Casterman, 1937). Interview 213 first one goes into a drawer without any light. So we also operate this rotation for extra protection of the works. Miller: I read in the article on the museum website that you decided to minimise the captions and the contextual information. I wondered if you were tempted to do the opposite. Because Hergé has been ideologically controver- sial, I wondered if you were tempted to counter the criticism he’s attracted, or simply just to give more information for younger visitors who maybe weren’t aware of the background. Swarte: Well, there are two things. The first is that I prefer to present him as a comic artist, which means that the work itself is the main part of the presentation. Of course, we have some information on display boards about his background, but this is limited. And there are captions next to each work, and in each room there is a board that explains what is being exhibited in there, so the theme of the room is also presented, and then in some of the rooms we explain the historical timeline, what happened in such and such a year. Of course you can see that recent publications have given a lot of attention to the period around the Second World War, because it wasn’t so open before. And I think that in a museum this could be given a bit more attention than it has at the moment. But that is something we are talking about, so that could be an extra thing to do. On the other hand, what you see in Hergé’s life is that he developed in the same way that Europe developed during the twentieth century, so he is symptomatic of what happened in Europe. He was born into a petit bourgeois milieu in Belgium, whose emancipation was strongly connected to the Catholic Church, just as Hergé was, and the Catholic Church was strongly connected to right-wing politics, and so he published in this sort of magazine, in this sort of milieu. Now what happened is that he continued doing so during the Second World War, and after the war he developed like Europe itself developed. He got more and more liberal, felt more and more free, divorced his first wife, started his relationship with Fanny and married her, but then he also became inter- ested in Eastern philosophies. Miller: I was going to ask whether you saw Hergé as belonging within a specifi- cally Belgian cultural tradition or whether you see him as more transnational, but I think you’ve answered that. I think you see him as Belgian in his earlier days and then becoming more European. Swarte: I think so, yes. Miller: So there’s no aim of the museum to celebrate him as a Belgian artist particularly? Swarte: No, I don’t think so. His interest in the whole world means he did 214 joost swarte something that is celebrated all over the world. So not really Belgian, no. Miller: I also wanted to ask you just about the process of museification. Museums tend to have a consecrating function. How would you see Hergé being positioned? Is this a way of positioning him within legitimate culture, so to speak? Or would you regard him as being a popular cultural figure, a mass cultural figure, or do you think these distinctions don’t matter? Swarte: There are of course museums of modern art, and museums with older paintings, what is called ‘high art’. But the difference between high art and low art, I think, is much less important in our time than it was in earlier days. And I don’t feel that presenting this work in a museum situates Hergé in another discipline, the discipline of the high arts. I think these borders have become less important. It’s good to present his work because it’s lovely to see, and you can offer a lot to your visitors, but I think that Hergé himself felt this difference at a certain period. He started to paint himself because he was interested in contemporary art, collecting modern art, and in his own collection there were works by artists like Lucio Fontana and Sol LeWitt, people who were famous at the time that he was collecting. And he himself also started some courses in painting. But one day he asked a friend, ‘What do you really think of my painting?’ And the friend said, ‘The painting is OK, but the quality of your comic art is the best in the world, and within the world of painting, you’ll be just another painter’. And I think that after that he decided that his work was comics. And I think it is good that there are comics museums because it’s nice to look at comics, but comics should be judged as comics and not as another discipline. Miller: Can I ask you about your own work in relation to Hergé? Obviously for someone who is famous for using the ligne claire, Hergé casts a very long shadow. Do you constantly feel that you’re negotiating with the legacy of Hergé, or is he just a starting point for you? Swarte: When I started as a comic artist, there was no training for this, so the only way to start was to look at the best artists that you knew and you liked, and try to see how they did it, and find out for yourself. And when I started first of all I was influenced by the American underground. I was a design student and I saw that in comics there was a lot more freedom than there was at that time in the design world. Design was more functional at that period, it was the late sixties. And so I decided that I preferred the freedom of expression that was common in the American underground. So I started producing underground comics. But after a year I looked at my work and I said, ‘Why doesn’t it have the magic that I remember from my youth?’ So then I went back to the older books that were still at my parents’ house, and I looked at the Tintin books, and I thought, Interview 215

‘This is so well done, and I feel as if I’m living alongside the characters in the comic’. And first I thought it was all about the way that he drew, so I tried to copy his style of drawing. And then I found out that it’s not just the drawing, it’s more the breakdown of the story, the sequencing of the images, how you work with cliffhangers at the end of the page, how much information you give, and what you don’t give but what you show, and there are lots more things than just the art. But by then I was already feeling very much at home with this clear line drawing, so I could do a lot with this style, as I’m also interested in design, architecture, etc. So I could give information to my readers very easily: it’s almost like a clear language in drawing. And I was satisfied with this, so I kept on with it, and I developed it further in my own direction. I felt always that Hergé played a very important part in my formation as a comic artist. Miller: Do you have a continuing role in relation to the museum? Swarte: We haven’t talked about this. I’ve had a few calls – ‘How can we solve this problem?’ But that’s just informal, so there is not a function for me in the museum. But I still have an exhibition for two more weeks in the room that is designed for temporary exhibitions. That was one of the things that I thought was very important for the museum: that besides the presentation of the works of Hergé, there would be a connection with the present day. So not only can the museum base exhibitions around an additional chapter or a new vision of the works of Hergé, but it can also invite other artists, including young artists, to put on exhibitions that have a connection with the work of Hergé. If Hergé was interested in aspects of certain countries, they could create an exhibition around that in the museum, in order to delve further into Hergé’s interests. That makes it possible to set up new exhibitions. We have already had one about Tchang, Hergé’s friend who was his main source of information for the Lotus bleu.4 And then now recently I have had my exhibition there, so I have been around the museum a lot. Miller: So this is only on for two more weeks? Is it going somewhere else? Swarte: It could. This is a travelling exhibition that was also in Erlangen, the festival in Germany, in the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon and it was in Grenoble and now it’s here and we are still looking for a place to show in Holland. It could be that it will be shown again. Miller: Well, thank you very much, this has been immensely interesting.

4 Hergé, Le Lotus bleu [‘The Blue Lotus’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1936). Interview with Farid Boudjellal Mark McKinney

Abstract Farid Boudjellal (b. 1953), a French cartoonist of Algerian and Armenian heritage, outlines his approach to comics. He discusses important inspirations and influences, including cartoonists from France (Gébé), Italy (Hugo Pratt) and the United States (Milton Caniff). He speaks of themes that are important to his work, especially tempo- rality, a multiplicity of characters, dreams and fantasy. Boudjellal also distinguishes his comics from autobiography, a genre that he shuns, and critiques the sociological reductionism often found in the critical reception of his comics. He discusses his artistic techniques, including black-and-white line drawing, watercolor, and intercon- nected speech balloons. His interview provides an overview of his career and his ongoing projects in comics, which he situates against the general evolution of comics in France from the 1960s up to the present.

A Brief Introduction to the Author and his Work1 Farid Boudjellal is a highly accomplished and well-published cartoonist, whose career now spans more than thirty years (he began publishing comics in 1978). Born in Toulon in 1953 to working-class Algerian immigrant parents, he became interested in comics during his childhood, especially in the small-format ones called ‘pockets’, which often contained translations of Italian comics by artists such as Essegesse.2 He has been living and working in Paris for many years now, and published his first comic books with Futuropolis there in the 1980s. He has received prizes at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD), the national French comics festival in Angoulême: the Résistances prize for Ramadân (1989) and two Œcuménique [‘Ecumenical’] prizes for Petit Polio [‘Little Polio’] (1999, for volume 1; in 2003, a special mention for volume

1 Interview conducted and translated by Mark McKinney. The introduction, footnotes, illustra- tion captions and catalogue raisonné of Boudjellal’s comic books are by Mark McKinney. The editors warmly thank Farid Boudjellal for his generous willingness to be interviewed and his kind permission to reproduce the illustrations. 2 In fact, a trio of cartoonists: Giovanni Sinchetto, Dario Guzzon and Pietro Sartoris. European Comic Art 4.1 (2011) doi:10.3828/eca.2011.2 2 mark mckinney 3).3 He has appeared as an invited guest at numerous festivals in France and abroad, including the 1997 International Festival of Comic Art (at Georgetown University in Washington, DC). Boudjellal also worked as a scriptwriter for La Famille Ramdam [‘The Ramdam Family’], a situation comedy televised in France. His work has been published in and covered by numerous French and Algerian national news publications and media, including a cover story in the weekly news magazine Le Point (1987).

The Interview

McKinney: Could you present yourself by speaking a bit about your career – its beginning and evolution – your favourite themes and your accomplishments? Boudjellal: Well I began publishing in Circus, then in Charlie Mensuel [‘Charlie Monthly’].4 Circus was at the end of the 1970s. May 1968 had offered us new freedoms, and we had the Astérix phenomenon, the Pilote of Goscinny and Charlie Mensuel.5 We were already aspiring to do comic strips a bit differ- ently, auteur comics [une bande dessinée d’auteur], even if we didn’t call it that at the time. We were starting to be interested in other forms of comics. And so I mostly published comic strips at the time when I created my character Abdullah. It was a strip with different characters, with an identical drawing in each of three frames. These days it’s called iteration, and it’s become something very modern.6 It’s even the height of modernity, but I was already doing it. And I believe that other authors, such as the marvellous Gébé, were doing it even before me. I liked his narration and his drawing style a lot: Berck [‘Yuck’] and Une Plume pour Clovis [‘A Quill for Clovis’].7 I had been brought up on very classical comics, but there I was discovering Hugo Pratt,8 Charlie Mensuel and a

3 For full bibliographic references, see the catalogue raisonné that follows the interview. 4 Circus (1975–1989) was a comics periodical of Glénat and published work by many artists, including Hugo Pratt and François Bourgeon, who launched his Les Passagers du vent [‘Passen- gers of the Wind’] series in it about the slave trade. Charlie Mensuel was a comics periodical first published by the Éditions du Square (1969–1981; also associated with the periodical Hara-Kiri) and then by Dargaud (1982–1986). Nikita Mandryka became editor in 1982, with the launch of the new version. 5 The events of May 1968 in France famously included a spectacular student revolt and wide- spread strikes of workers, and nearly brought down the French government. They helped usher in a relaxing of censorship, including in comics, and inspired a generation and beyond. René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo launched their Astérix comics series, featuring a village of Gauls who resist Julius Caesar and his army, in the first issue of Pilote magazine in October 1959. Goscinny was director of the magazine from 1961 to 1974. 6 Thierry Groensteen discusses iconic iteration in Oupus 1 (Paris: L’Association, 1997), 20–26, a founding publication of OuBaPo, the Ouvroir de la Bande dessinée Potentielle (Comics Work- shop). 7 Gébé (Georges Blondeau; 1929–2004) belonged to the Éditions du Square group and was editor- in-chief of Hara-Kiri, 1969–1985. 8 Hugo Pratt (1927–1995), who grew up in Venice and Italian East Africa, created his character in Interview with Farid Boudjellal 3

Figure 1: A comic strip from the series Les Dingues dignes [‘The Dignified Wackos’], which exemplifies the use of iteration by Boudjellal in the late 1970s. The character says: (1) ‘39–45: Two years of guerilla fighting and three of deportation … Nothing to scarf down, nothing to fuck! ... After that I had myself Indochina … The mud, the bombs that fall on you when you’re least expecting them! ...’; (2) ‘And then Algeria … Worse than anything, Algeria!! Three wars, that’s a lot of hard knocks! ...’; (3) ‘But so what! …’; (4) ‘I don’t regret anything!’. From Circus 19 (September 1979), p. 39. © Farid Boudjellal.

lot of audacious authors, a mix of European and American comics. At the time, in terms of press publications, we were very fortunate in France. McKinney: So how did you transition from your first comic strip – featuring Abdullah, a battered woman, a handicapped person – to your next work, in book publications at Futuropolis?9 Boudjellal: There was even someone in a Catholic confessional. In fact I was working out my drawing style. I believe that comic strips provide excellent schooling. You have three frames, you know that there has to be a punch line [un gag] at the end, except for a realist strip, which is different. I’ve never made a realist strip. It’s something that I would have loved to do (Figure 1). McKinney: And yet one could say that your comic strips are in fact realist ones?

1967 in Sgt Kirk, an Italian periodical, where he serialized Una Ballata del Mare Salato [‘Ballad of the Salt Sea’], but developed him subsquently in Pif Gadget, À Suivre and other periodicals. 9 Futuropolis was a comics bookstore and innovative publishing house run by Florence Cestac and Étienne Robial, whose story Cestac tells in La Véritable Histoire de Futuropolis: 1972–1994 [‘The True Story of Futuropolis: 1972–1994’] (Paris: Dargaud, 2007). It was bought out by Gallimard and later relaunched in a cooperative venture with Soleil, a comics publishing house run by Mourad Boudjellal, the younger brother of Farid Boudjellal. 4 mark mckinney Boudjellal: Yes, but they were still very humorous. No, I’m talking about a serialised realist strip, such as those published in the press in the United States. It’s typically American. In the daily press, with that famous expectative wait until the next day to have the next episode. It’s a space that readers can fill, which feeds their imagination: what happened, they wonder? Some people did this kind of thing in France, or in Belgium, such as Hergé in his serial publications that preceded his books [ses prépublications], where he published a page a week, with a twist [une chute] at the end of each page. A twist that was sometimes idiotic, by the way: someone knocks! So what’s going on? You waited a week to see Thomson and Thompson who banged into each other on the next page. But you had a week to fill things in and imagine outcomes that were often more interesting than the ones provided by the creator of Tintin. That delay has practically disappeared. Today we want everything right away, and the imaginary functions differently. McKinney: You have spoken in the past about your admiration for Milton Caniff, in this respect.10 Boudjellal: Yes, he had to synchronise his daily strips and his Sunday pages. It’s quite a feat to have been able to do that. It must have been an extraordinary intellectual exercise. McKinney: And so how did you begin publishing your first books, with Futur- opolis? Boudjellal: The first pages of L’Oud [‘The Lute’] were first published in Charlie Mensuel, but interest in this kind of comics diminished and periodicals became much more timorous. A lot of them ceased publication. Authors who didn’t quite fit the norm were accused of having killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. I remember that when Charlie Mensuel was being relaunched in a new form, after having been purchased by Dargaud, I met Nikita Mandryka.11 He was a founder of L’Écho des savanes [‘The Echo of the Savannas’], a magazine that helped to promote a different kind of comics and whose slogan was ‘La nouvelle BD c’est dans L’Écho qu’elle est’ [‘The new comics are in The Echo’]. What a surprise, what a disappointment to discover that Mandryka had completely switched sides. He only swore by part one of the Raiders of the Lost Ark series, which had just been released in cinemas. It was obvious that there were few links between L’Oud and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those who invited you, especially in Métal hurlant [‘Heavy Metal’], to stop publishing stories that were constructed in a classical style – like a house, with a window, a door, a

10 Milton Caniff (1907–1988) was a cartoonist from Ohio who created the series ‘Terry and the Pirates’, ‘Male Call’ and ‘Steve Canyon’. He influenced European cartoonists such as Victor Hubinon and Hugo Pratt. 11 Mandryka (b. 1940) is a cartoonist of Russian heritage who was born in Tunisia. He is perhaps best known for his Concombre masqué [‘Masked Cucumber’] series. Cf. n. 4 above. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 5

Figure 2: A comic strip by the Anita Comix Studio (Farid Boudjellal, José Jover, Roland Monpierre) that ran in the Parisian left-of-centre daily paper Libération as the Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme [‘March for Equality and Against Racism’], nicknamed the Marche des Beurs [‘March of the Arabs’], arrived in Paris. It reads: (1) ‘Exclusive: Saturday, during the march, witnesses claimed to have seen a series of miracles with their own eyes. The Arabs walked on the Seine! …’; (2) ‘They also made hot-sausage- and-fries sandwiches appear, which they distributed to the hysterical crowd’. From Libération, 5 December 1983, p. 2. © Farid Boudjellal, José Jover and Roland Monpierre.

chimney – and make them in the shape of an elephant, quickly climbed down off of the animal’s back to go back into the house that they had criticised, and whose key they had prudently kept. While our elders got back into line, some continued to make elephant-shaped stories. In reality, I wasn’t really affected by all this, because I have always created well-structured stories, never ones that go off in all directions, like a kind of automated break-down [découpage]. Writing takes time. That’s why I greatly admire authors like Milton Caniff. After the death of Charlie Mensuel, where my first pages had been serialised, there was a short period during which I tried to find work. And that’s when we created Anita Comix, with José and Roland.12 We thought that by pooling our talent we could multiply our chances of publishing (Figure 2). It was out of desperation that I went over to Futuropolis on the advice of my now deceased friend, André Igwal, who appreciated my work: ‘You shouldn’t drop that. You should offer it to them’. But I didn’t really believe in it anymore and I went off in different directions. When I offered the pages of L’Oud to

12 Anita Comix was a comics studio that José Jover, of Spanish heritage, Roland Monpierre, of Martinican heritage and Farid Boudjellal created in the early 1980s in Paris. They published one eponymous comic book in 1984, but placed their comics in various periodicals too. All three cartoonists published books with the first version of Futuropolis. Monpierre continues occasion- ally to publish comic books, notably a multi-volume biography of Bob Marley, and Jover now runs his own publishing house, Tartamudo Éditions, which has published some of Boudjellal’s books. 6 mark mckinney

Figure 3: In L’Oud [‘The Lute’] two Maghrebi characters in Toulon compete to see who can play the instrument better. In the first panel Abdulah asks – ‘It was Johnny Hallyday, he taught you how to play the lute, so why don’t you do rock?’ Aziz retorts – ‘Before you criticize, you’d do better to show us what you know!’ Christine looks on from behind, delighted at Abdulah’s put-down of Aziz. Abdulah then goes on to win the competition, hands down. From L’Oud (Paris: Futuropolis, 1983), p. 29. © Farid Boudjellal.

Robial, I didn’t even realise that he accepted them. So I changed my inking style to become more academic. I switched from the Rotring art pen to a brush, with full down strokes and fine up strokes [des pleins et des déliés], which made Robial laugh a lot. He said ‘No, don’t do that!’ During our discussion I told him: ‘You know, I’m a realist cartoonist’. His answer knocked me over: ‘But what you were doing before was a lot more realistic. You’re lucky to be able to evoke an emotion with a minimum amount of line drawing, so why give up on that?’ I had to admit that he was right, and I picked up my Rotring again. So he published L’Oud, whose appearance in bookstores coincided with the first March for Equality.13 The book naturally drew a lot of media attention, not

13 The Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme [‘March for Equality and Against Racism’] was a non- violent protest march that crossed France from the south (Marseilles and Lyons) to Paris in 1983. It was modelled in part on the civil-rights activism of Martin Luther King. Christian Delorme, a Catholic priest, helped organise it, but many of the marchers were youths of immigrant, working- class and often North African background. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 7

for its quality but because of its connection to a generation that interested the media (Figure 3). Thanks in part to the economic crisis, and in parallel with the demands of the march, the Front national (FN) [National Front] was growing in strength. The March for Equality was the expression of an exasperation. There had been a lot of violent attacks [bavures] on youths who had been born in France to immigrant parents and who wanted to be considered as the equals of the host population. These young people began a march leading from Lyons and Marseilles to Paris. By the way, I was in the demonstration in Paris, I had helped out with it. The media spoke a bit improperly of a ‘Beur’ fashion, of a ‘Beur’ movement, a word that I had just discovered.14 I was thirty years old then. McKinney: Yes and you published a page in Libération, which was, I believe, for the arrival of the March for Equality in Paris (Figure 4). Boudjellal: Yes, a full page, where I created the Slimani family. It’s in that page that I began to work out what was to follow L’Oud. I used that publication to present the Slimani family to readers. I was really moving into the theme of the family, which I have always enjoyed. By family I mean the group. I much prefer to work on stories about a group, rather than those focusing on an individual. It amuses me to see how many useless panels there are in a lot of comics: an image where we see the hero taking out his cigarette pack, an image where he holds the cigarette, an image where he puts it in his mouth, an image where he flicks his lighter, an image where he blows out smoke. I don’t like lazy narra- tion, and prefer that it be tighter. We have a limited number of images, so why waste them by saying nothing at all? McKinney: I wonder whether what you don’t like is a kind of romantic hero, somewhat cut off from the world, who smokes his cigarette and shows off a bit. Boudjellal: No, I was really taken with Corto Maltese through Les Éthiopiques [‘Corto Maltese in Africa’]. Beginning with Corto Maltese in Siberia, the character no longer interested me, because what was interesting in Corto Maltese were the secondary characters including Cush, who was an even more powerful character than Corto Maltese. Beginning with Corto Maltese in Siberia, he refocuses too much on Corto Maltese, who loses a lot of interest. But because Pratt was very erudite, he managed to make it still hold together, but there’s no longer that magic. Maybe they were wrong, with this auteur policy [politique d’auteur], to tell Pratt, ‘you have as many pages as you want to tell your story’. McKinney: You seem to be speaking of a transition between L’Oud, where there are these different male characters – who end up together and try to constitute a sort of community and to get along, and which could correspond more to an immigration of men without their families, cut off somewhat from

14 ‘Beur’ is now commonly taken to be a backslang term, originally Parisian, derived from ‘Arab’. 8 mark mckinney

Figure 4: The first page of Farid Boudjellal’s Slimani family saga was published in Libération when the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism arrived in Paris. From Libération, 3–4 December 1983, p. 6 © Farid Boudjellal. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 9 their community – to a more connected, family community in Le Gourbi [‘The Hovel’] and then in Ramadân [‘Ramadan’]. Was that a conscious choice: were you trying to make a transition there? Why did that transition happen? Boudjellal: In fact, at the time I had my characters. Without it being something purposefully autobiographical, I was also dipping into my family history. I was lucky enough to have something to say, and I was preoccupied with time in comics. Ramadân is a book that was solely conceived as a meditation on time: how can one express time in comics? That’s how I extended my reflection on the comic strip. How can one bring a crowd of characters to life, not necessarily through a targeted story, a lone story, but with almost as many stories as there are characters? It was already very complicated (Figure 5). And with Le Cousin harki [‘The Harki Cousin’], I play a lot on that. My problems were really technical ones: it wasn’t a problem with writing. And then, well, I became a kind of poet of immigration in the eyes of critics. Often it wasn’t about me or my work that they were speaking, but it was especially about the perception that society had, through me, of a community. But what they were writing about my work disappointed me, because they didn’t talk about it as being a research into narrative [une recherche narrative]. I would have liked it if they had talked about me as someone who is really a writer, in the vein of Milton Caniff. And they only talked to me about integration, immigration and racism. I haven’t much talked about racism outside of Les Soirées d’Abdulah and in the first pages of L’Oud, where one of my characters spits on France [crache sur la France] (Figure 6). Maybe also in Petit Polio, and even there it’s not about racism in the case of my character César. Instead, it’s a kind of traumatic wound from the Algerian War. 15 Racism has never been my favourite topic. And each time they pull me back into things like that. It wasn’t really my doing, which is rather curious. This happened once I started drawing characters such as Abdullah, who came out of an immigrant milieu. It’s as though one pigeonholed Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker, as simply a witness to Japanese society. When my second book, Le Gourbi, came out in Algeria, it was read there in the way that I had created it. There was a gap between a critic in France who described the book as ‘S.O.S. Racisme in comics’,16 and the Algerians who saw it as being about the housing crisis, with which they were familiar. For them it was set in Algiers! In Le Gourbi we don’t see the Eiffel Tower, even though it’s set in Paris. Sure, there’s the subway in it, but in Algiers the idea of a subway has become a big joke:

15 César is a white French working-class character in the first two volumes of Petit Polio. He is drafted to fight in the Algerian War (1954–1962), in which an army buddy is killed. When he returns on leave to Toulon he is embittered against North Africans, including his former friend Abdelsalem Slimani, the father of Boudjellal’s Algerian-French family of fictional characters. He fights Abdelsalem, but then they become reconciled. 16 S.O.S. Racisme is a French antiracist organisation created in 1984, the year after the Marche pour l’égalité. From the beginning it was close to the French Socialist Party. 10 mark mckinney

Figure 5: A fascinating page in Ramadân featuring Boudjellal’s Slimani family illus- trates the artist’s research into the treatment of time in comics and his dexterity in managing several semi-independent stories with multiple characters. From Ramadân (Paris: Futuropolis, 1988), p. 41. © Farid Boudjellal. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 11 they’re still waiting for the subway, the famous subway that was supposed to be built there. And there the Algerians read it outside of the idea of racism. The French read it through the lens of racism, integration, which are their own preoccupations with respect to a community (Figure 7). McKinney: Could you speak some about the evolution of your art? You started in black and white, and in Petit Polio (Figure 8) we’re now in colours that often recall the south of France, I would say. Boudjellal: In the beginning, in L’Oud, Le Gourbi and Ramadân, I really saw myself as a stylist. And it’s funny, I’m becoming somewhat of a stylist again. Petit Polio is in watercolour [aquarelle], and in it I completely let loose: I wasn’t trying to draw well. Instead I was throwing the colours onto the page. There had to be some awkwardness [de la maladresse] to it, whereas in Le Cousin harki I’m trying to do something that’s more finished, so it’s taking me longer. It’s

Figure 6: Abdulah, an Algerian immigrant worker, walks along a street in Toulon. The page exemplifies Boudjellal’s black-and-white drawing technique. From Les Soirées d’Abdulah/Ratonnade (Paris: Futuropolis, 1985), unnumbered. © Farid Boudjellal. 12 mark mckinney

Figure 7: The opening page to Boudjellal’s Le Gourbi [‘The Hovel’] carefully maps out the small Parisian apartment where the nine members of the Slimani family, and their cat, live. When the book was published, Algerians read it as a commentary on the housing crisis, with which residents of Algiers, for example, have long been acutely familiar. From L’Oud, vol. 2, Le Gourbi (Paris: Futuropolis, 1985), p. 1. © Farid Boudjellal. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 13

Figure 8: In the first volume of Petit Polio [‘Little Polio’], President Charles de Gaulle, who has newly come to power through a putsch during the national crisis brought on by the Algerian War, visits the city of Toulon. Here de Gaulle insists that the mayor give him an impudent drawing that young Mahmoud (i.e., ‘Little Polio’) made, and which blew out of his hand as he was watching the parade go by, only to land in the motorcade car carrying the dignitaries: (1) ‘Later! First show me the paper that you hid in your pocket during the parade!’; ‘But … It’s not …’; (2) ‘That’s an order!’; ‘Very well, Gen … Pardon me, Mister President! …’. When Boudjellal goes to festivals, some readers are disappointed when he tells them that he invented this funny portion of the episode. From Petit Polio, t. 1 (Toulon: Soleil, 1998), p. 27. © Farid Boudjellal. due out in 2012. Sébastien Gnaedig, my editor, and I thought that since in 2012 we’ll be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, it would be good to have it ready then, he said, because we’ll have a document that wasn’t made for it but that is about it nonetheless. Instead of ordering something artificially made for it [un truc fabriqué], here we have something that naturally fits it [un truc pas fabriqué]. It’s funny, for the fifty years of independence, to make a book entitled Le Cousin harki. It’s daring!17 It’s possible that I’ll go back to black and white one day, because I still find black and white drawing attrac- tive. It’s practically become the norm for auteur comics. The graphic novel is in black and white.

17 Harki is a term generally used to refer to Algerians who fought in the French army during the Algerian War. When the French withdrew in 1962, only a small percentage of them were allowed by the French government to leave and to stay in France. There were widespread massacres of thousands of Harkis in Algeria, which began even before the French army withdrew from the country. 14 mark mckinney

Figure 9: In the first volume of Djinn [‘Genie’], Hadj Moussa must reckon with a genie that has just entered his body against his will and now promises immortality. The panel exemplifies the narrative possibilities of doubling a character and producing a kind of split consciousness: the djinn asks, ‘Even if I tell you that you’re immortal?’, to which Hadj Moussa responds, ‘Immortal in the body of an old man?’. From Djinn, colour by Farid Boudjellal and Sophie Mondésir (Toulon: Label Or, 1992), p. 11. © Farid Boudjellal.

McKinney: I wonder whether there isn’t a dreamlike quality [une part d’onirique] too that runs through your work, that one finds here and there: dreams and nightmares that recur. What do you think? Boudjellal: Yes, of course, enormously. I’m very drawn to the fantastic. I think we’ll see even more of it in Le Cousin harki. I’m happy that you saw that. McKinney: We see it, for example, in Petit Polio, where Petit Polio has a night- mare, where there’s a crocodile – which was a stuffed toy from Algeria and is in the colours of the Algerian flag – that comes forward with its huge mouth and almost swallows up Petit Polio. That’s when he wakes up. Boudjellal: Yes, and in Djinn too the fantastic is important. And what’s rich in potential, when you look carefully at the character of the Djinn, is that he combines two people, two individuals (Figure 9). It’s really a bit schizophrenic: two individuals in the same head and body. And you can see that the character Robert, in Mémé d’Arménie [‘Grandma from Armenia’], is in somewhat the same situation with respect to his mother tongue, which is somewhat true for me too, but for Arabic. In fact that’s essentially what Leïla Sebbar writes: Interview with Farid Boudjellal 15

‘I don’t speak my father’s tongue.’18 Arabic is a language that I have in me, which I can feel and hear, but with a kind of wound that comes from a separa- tion that has caused me to forget the language. Not forgotten, but I mean that we look at each other, we observe each other. And that’s what Robert says when he tries to learn Armenian: he can’t speak it but he can understand everything. He has to hire a professor to help him, and he even drives his professor crazy. There we’re in the midst of things that are always very, very precious for a narrator. In an ordinary person it would call for a good psychoanalytic treat- ment, but artists psychoanalyze themselves, so they have outlets. But if I didn’t have comics, I might be in a straitjacket, with a funnel on my head, saying ‘bouboubouboubou’, mumbling incomprehensibly! McKinney: There’s something else that I find fascinating in Mémé d’Arménie: the juxtapositions. I open the book at random and look at page thirty, and there I see Robert, his wife and his friend on the one hand, and then, after one transi- tional image where we see the city of Toulon, we see Mémé d’Arménie and her family. So there’s a connecting together, a mastery of the page layout, of the use of the page, and of juxtaposition that seem interesting to me (Figure 10). Boudjellal: Yes, that’s precisely the way that I work the comic strip: first, I provide the setting in an image. Then there’s the second strip, which shows a scene made up of five images, with interconnected speech balloons [bulles raccordées], which is very practical and creates an instantaneousness. You can change your horizons: a character is still speaking and bang, readers find themselves inside another image, elsewhere. And so there you have two scenes, linked together by interconnected speech balloons. These are techniques that I used much less often in L’Oud and Le Gourbi, but which I borrowed from American comics, although they don’t appear there in the way that I use them. In those comics they’re essentially used to separate portions of text. Stan Lee, in superhero comics such as The Silver Surfer, uses speech in a very declamatory manner. He wants to write very long texts and then divides them up into several balloons to avoid weighing down the balloon, encourage the reader to read and emphasise certain elements. Whereas I use them really to move from one situation to the next, from one setting to the next. In Le Cousin harki I’ve radicalised this even further: I use this system again, but this time to move from virtually one time period to another, to return twenty years into the past. McKinney: That seems very productive to me, because it allows you to put together, without losing the reader, situations that are in parallel, and therefore to create a kind of shock between two situations that have a relationship that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious without this technique.

18 Leïla Sebbar (b. 1941) is a French author of mixed Algerian (father) and French (mother) parentage. She has published essays and many novels – several of the latter are about youths of postcolonial immigrant heritage in France. 16 mark mckinney

Figure 10: In Mémé d’Arménie [‘Grandma from Armenia’] interconnected speech balloons [bulles raccordées] help configure the relationship between bourgeois and working-class characters. From Mémé d’Arménie, afterword by Martine Lagardette (Paris: Futuropolis: 2006), p. 30. © Farid Boudjellal. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 17

Boudjellal: Yes, of course, but it’s because they’re stories that include several characters. We’re not talking about a story with a hero whom one follows, or even a duo or a trio of characters. One can play with spatial and temporal differ- ences, and that adds to the richness of story-telling in comics, which constitute a fully-fledged narrative art. The treatment of time is important in part because reading is a pastime. In my stories my main preoccupation is how to make time unfold. Even in Le Cousin harki I know perfectly well what I want to say, but how can I say it in a way that creates density? With a manga I could include five or six images per page and create a story that’s four hundred pages long. Instead I limit myself to sixty pages or so, which are as dense as a manga that’s four hundred pages long, because the role of time in a manga and a comic is very different, as is their functioning. McKinney: Is the sixty-page limit something that you gave yourself, or does it come from the publisher too, at least in part, for example, from the fact that colour pages are more expensive? Boudjellal: I don’t have a concrete constraint; I can produce seventy pages if I wish. Here in Le Cousin harki I wrote a first chapter that’s twenty pages long and was extremely laborious to create. In it I bring my new character into Les Jours Plissés.19 Today I wouldn’t redo what I did in Les Années Ventoline [‘The Ventoline Years’], where I wanted to keep things short. In fact, it would have been easier for me to make it 150 pages, and that’s what I should have done. McKinney: Is that really easier? Boudjellal: And it’s different too, because when you come up with a book that’s 150 pages long, you’re apparently creating a graphic novel, and you’re paid a fixed, flat rate [tu es payé au forfait]. When you’re doing comics [de la bande] you’re paid by the page. So you have to keep that in mind, and I prefer being paid by the page than a flat rate, because it’s a better deal [c’est plus intéressant]. McKinney: A flat rate is the total sum for the whole book? Boudjellal: The graphic novel amounts to an impoverishment, it’s important not to be fooled about that. You’re no longer paid by the page, but instead they give you an advance, like they give writers [les écrivains]. So it’s an advance on the author’s royalties, whereas for classical comic books [dans l’album classique] we’re paid by the page. McKinney: So you’re still paid by the page for your books? Boudjellal: Yes, I’m paid by the page. It’s a better deal, and it gives me the time to prepare the book. Having said that, I might still do a black and white

19 Les Jours Plissés is a fictional clinic for asthmatics in Boudjellal’s Les Années ventoline and its forthcoming sequel, Le Cousin harki. It is based on the real clinic Les Cadrans Solaires in Vence, in the south of France. 18 mark mckinney book one day. It’s a lot quicker, so I could have a little fun and be paid with an advance. When you make hard-bound colour comic books that are even more classical than what I do, it requires an enormous amount of time. Mangas are made by studios, so they can produce 150 pages a month, but the European cartoonist who can draw eight pages a month is a fast one. We’re still very much artists. I like mangas such as Le Journal de mon père [‘My Father’s Diary’] and Quartier lointain [‘A Distant Neighborhood’], but even the work of the great, great Japanese authors, stylistically speaking, lets you know that it’s from a studio. The settings [les décors] are drawn with rulers, whereas if you do it freehand, that betrays the style [ça trahit le style], it’s awkward [maladroit]. And awkwardness [la maladresse] is style, style is awkwardness. As soon as you take a ruler to draw the setting you diminish the style. There are fewer options with a straight line and a ruler, than with a freehand line. McKinney: You mentioned the graphic novel, and non-fictional autobiography is another big tendency in comics right now in France, Europe and the United States. I don’t mean that autobiography is not fictionalised, but autobiography is presented as such, as autobiography. You have never done this kind of work as far as I know, and I wonder why. Do you think you might do some one day, or not? And why? Boudjellal: No, it’s a genre that doesn’t interest me, because the past is dead. It’s very funny, though, because when I go to festivals, people think that Petit Polio is the most autobiographical thing that could be, because they recognise me in it. They see that I have a physical handicap, they know about my Maghrebi heritage,20 and I speak with a southern accent: they recognise Petit Polio. So when I tell them that I made up the story about the drawing of De Gaulle in volume one, they’re disappointed (Figure 8). Sometimes I even tell myself that I would do better to lie about it, but autobiography is a lie in any case: the words on the white page are a lie. Then there’s the journal [le journal intime], but I don’t belong to a scene [un milieu] that could be interested in that. Deep down I’m still a part of the group, and I couldn’t talk about those who are close to me. Sure, it happens that I sketch a page or two to make fun of José in a novel, but toss my life out there [balancer ma vie],21 say it’s true … I could have made a killing from it though! Polio, Arab, I could have played it differently! I know very well how to implicate French society. I can play the whore, but I’m not inter- ested in that, not at all. Autobiography, crying about oneself, all that, it doesn’t much interest me, or even, for example, the question of time in autobiography. I would say that David B’s work is really the top drawer stuff, because at the same time as he wants to be very, very autobiographical, he escapes through the graphic style [le graphisme]. But I also liked the first Journal of Fabrice Neaud, I

20 I.e., North African. 21 In slang, ‘balancer’ can also mean to betray – for example, to the police – so the idea of betrayal is also implicit here. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 19

found it touching.22 It presents itself first of all as a journal [un journal intime], and it’s a homosexual voice that’s very sexualised. It speaks of both love and desire. It’s a much more conventional graphic style than that of David. But the subsequent volumes don’t interest me that much. I have the impression that if I read the second volume I’d be a peeper [un mateur]. I remember taking a train to Limoges, and I met up with Léandri, a guy who writes for Fluide Glacial.23 We went into a first-class car and realised that Jean-François Kahn was there, and that there were other writers there.24 It was a smoking car, there were still smoking compartments, so I told Léandri that I was going to go smoke a cigar. I go there and see a young woman with an empty seat next to her. I ask her whether I can sit next to her and she says ‘Yes.’ It was a young Maghrebi- looking woman, and at one point she sees Léandri heading off to the bathroom. So she asks me, ‘Excuse me, but that gentleman wouldn’t be Maëster, would he?’25 And I say, ‘No, that’s not Maëster, it’s Léandri, but you’re right that he works at Fluide Glacial, like Maëster. So you’re a Fluide Glacial reader?’ And she tells me, ‘Not really, a bit, but I had a professor whom I liked very, very much, who spoke about Fluide Glacial and who works there’. I said, ‘Hang on, was your professor André Igwal?’ So she tells me, ‘Yes, yes. He’s someone who helped me work out some anger [m’a sortie d’une colère] that I had, who really helped me’. I told her, ‘You know, André Igwal is dead’. And in fact she had just written L’Enfer des tournantes [‘To Hell and Back: The Life of Samira Bellil’].26 She gave me an inscribed copy of her book, which I started to read. She tells horrible things, about how she was raped in the suburbs [les banlieues].27 After a few pages I closed it and told her, ‘Listen, I started your book, but I’ll not finish it, because I have the impression that I’m peeping [mater]. Now that I know you I can’t read it, it’s impossible’. She died since, of cancer. It was someone I knew, whose pain I had glimpsed. But, aside from that, when people use autobiog- raphy to create humour or things like that, it’s something different. McKinney: There’s a very beautiful scene of reconciliation between César and Abdelsalem in Petit Polio, after a conflict between them over the pain of the Algerian War. It’s a very touching scene that speaks about pain and violence

22 The first volume of the journal of Fabrice Neaud (b. 1968) in comics covers the period of February 1992 to September 1993. It was published by Ego Comme X (Angoulême) in 1996. 23 Bruno Léandri (b. 1951) has published in Hara-Kiri and Fluide Glacial. 24 Jean-François Kahn (b. 1938) is a journalist who founded the periodicals L’Évènement du jeudi and Marianne, which he directed until 2007. He then moved into politics. 25 Maëster (i.e., Jean-Marie Ballester (b. 1959)) is a cartoonist who contributed comics to Fluide Glacial for many years. He has published several comic books. 26 As a teenager, Bellil (1972–2004), of Algerian heritage, was raped repeatedly, including in a gang rape, in the housing project where she lived in a Parisian suburb. Her book told the story of the violence against her and drew national media attention. She worked to better the situation of young women in the working-class suburbs. She died of cancer. 27 ‘Banlieue’ is the French term for suburb, or outer-city, and often designates a working-class suburb, as it does here. 20 mark mckinney and at the same time finds a path toward peace. It’s very beautiful. Could you speak some about it? But I’d also like to ask you another question that’s linked to it. I believe that there are two places in your work where one finds Pieds- noirs, or colonisers,28 with Algerians: in ‘Amour d’Alger’, a short story that you published at the beginning of your career, and then in the second volume of Djinn. But what I haven’t seen is a story that takes place during or after the Algerian War, where someone of Pied-noir heritage meets someone from the Algerian immigration. I haven’t seen that reconciliation and I wonder why. Boudjellal: In Le Cousin harki you’ll certainly see something that comes close to that, because it’s about a French officer who fought in Indochina and then in the Second World War with the father of Moktar, the hero – my character, the harki cousin, who’s an intellectual – and who has become somewhat destitute and has converted to Islam. I think Ferrandez is the right person to focus on the Pieds-noirs.29 And then there’s Slim, who had a handsome project about them. He told me that he wanted to publish a comic on the Pieds-noirs, about whom he had good memories. I asked him ‘Why don’t you do that? You should!’ Curiously, he’s never done it. Of course it’s a topic that interests me. But I don’t know, maybe the colonisers themselves aren’t right next to my path. I’ve never really known any. McKinney: It’s just an observation. That encounter, between César and Abdel, was a very beautiful and strong one. So you’re saying that in Le Cousin harki there’s a French career soldier, plus a Harki, and there will be a kind of meeting … Boudjellal: There are already scenes with kids, scenes in high school [lycée], where we see Moktar with his buddies, who are Pieds-noirs, we could call them that. But I think that Ferrandez should do something about the Pieds-noirs, it would be his role. It would be good if he set a story in today’s time period [qu’il le fasse un peu de nos jours]. It might in fact be among his projects, who knows? McKinney: Yes, it’s true. There too is something that Ferrandez hasn’t done, except in a strip, once again at the beginning of his career, in a short story entitled ‘Le Pain des Français’ [‘The Bread of the French’], where there’s an Algerian or Maghrebi family in France. But aside from that I don’t think that he’s created a story set after the end of the war and in France, with the different communities.

28 ‘Pied-noir’ is one of the terms often used to designate French colonials in Algeria. Most of them fled the country at the end of the Algerian War in 1962. 29 Jacques Ferrandez was born in 1955 in Algiers to French colonials (Pieds-noirs). His family moved to mainland France while he was still an infant, and he grew up in the Nice region. He has published the ten-volume series Cahiers d’Orient, the first five volumes of which trace the French colonial history of Algeria from soon after the French invasion in 1830 until 1954, the second five volumes recounting the Algerian War (1954–1962). Interview with Farid Boudjellal 21

Boudjellal: Yes, it’s true. When Slim spoke to me about his project, I told him that he should absolutely do it. But there are a ton of untouched topics, like the coopérants,30 which would be an extraordinary topic. It’s true that it’s aston- ishing to see all these topics that remain fallow like that. There’s work for everyone. In fact it’s a bit of a shame to focus on the suburbs. There are a lot of options. After all, Algeria represents 130 years of colonisation. Sure, Indochina was three-quarters of a century. But Algeria, in terms of colonisation, was very important in French history and in Algerian history too. McKinney: When you look at the evolution of comics in France or Belgium today, are there other swatches of history or topics that seem to you curiously to lie fallow, and other topics, other themes that are worked on a lot and seem interesting to you? Boudjellal: It might be true that there will come a time when we’ll no longer present things either from the perspective of conflict or of dissatisfaction. There seems to be something in that thematic cluster that makes it so there’s always a conflict somewhere. It’s so linked to the present climate, to history, that every time we work, the first thing we see is that the wounds are far from healed. That’s clear. If the wounds were closed, we could find other angles. It’s obvious that when you take a book that’s entitled Le Cousin harki, you can only work on gaping wounds. But that doesn’t prevent one from doing something else. Still, when I see what’s been done on the Harkis, they’re the wretched of the earth! I myself, in making this book, Le Cousin harki, am caught up in my own prejudice. It’s all about how to become reconciled with them. And it’s an extraordinary reconciliation, because after all you’re dealing with the theme of betrayal. We didn’t knock the Harkis too much in front of the French [On n’a pas trop tapé sur les harkis devant la France], but in my milieu the Harkis were stamped with the seal of absolute betrayal! And when you’re a kid, Harki is the sign of the traitor! How does one become reconciled with the Harki that one carries inside oneself too? That’s because I myself was often seen as a Harki. McKinney: Why? Boudjellal: Because I spoke French with a Toulon accent, and also because I was French by filiation. My father obtained a French passport in 1948, so I ended up with a French passport through filiation. So even before the Algerian War, my father chose France [a fait le choix de la France]. McKinney: Which was rather rare at the time. Boudjellal: It was rare, but apparently he had absolutely no problem getting a passport. I made photocopies of the passports of my father and my grand-

30 The French term ‘coopérants’ refers to people who took the option of working (as teachers, for example) in a former French colony or another foreign country as an alternative to doing military service, until military conscription was suspended in France beginning in 1997. 22 mark mckinney

Figure 11: In Les Années Ventoline [‘The Ventoline Years’], Boudjellal depicts Mahmoud as he discovers a new world of comics by reading Charlie Mensuel [‘Charlie Monthly’] for the first time ever as he lies in bed with asthma in a specialist clinic in southern France. In this panel one recognizes characters from several important series in the history of comics, by cartoonists from France, the United Kingdom and the United States. From Les Années Ventoline (Paris: Futuropolis, 2007), p. 31. © Farid Boudjellal. mother. It’s true that when one looks around a little for one’s origins, one realises that maybe France itself didn’t pose so many problems for them after all. I was born in 1953, after all, before the Algerian War. I received very good medical care in France. I was even given orthopaedic shoes paid for by the social security system of this country, to which I remain very, very attached. One isn’t able to choose France, or rarely so [On n’a pas, ou très rarement, le choix de la France]. What I mean is that we’re no longer in a tribal system, we’re in a state system. In Algeria there wasn’t a centralised state back then, and it became centralised under French rule. The Algerian state was almost built on the murder of the Harkis, and things remain very tribal there. So it was neces- sary to build an Algerian state, also with its collaborators who aren’t collabora- tors, that is, who are part of this history of 130 years of French occupation.31 It’s very difficult to choose France. It’s to the point where I’m asking myself whether I’m totally convinced of it. But I think that with this book I will have truly reached the end of something, since all the books that I’m thinking of doing are not at all along those lines. I’m really already into something else.

31 The term ‘collaborator’ in this context reminds one of those French who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 23

McKinney: What are you thinking of going towards subsequently?

Boudjellal: It’s too early to talk about it, but things that have nothing to do with this. Maybe things about the medium itself [sur la bande dessinée elle-même].

McKinney: But in some way your books have always been about the medium itself, insofar as it seems to me that there have always been references to the medium in your comics. And where we find most of them, and where things in fact change a bit, it seems to me, is in Les Années Ventoline, where all these comics characters show up with the discovery of Charlie Mensuel (Figure 11).

Boudjellal: And, in fact, Le Cousin harki aspires only to that, to tell stories. For example, the most difficult scene for me in Le Cousin harki was when Moktar goes to the park, it’s the moment when Mahmoud and his friends are smoking their first joint. I already drew the same scene in Les Années Ventoline. I don’t know why, but Moktar shows up the day before, so I had to redo the scene in another way. I’m finally managing to put it together, because I’ve done the prologue. So now I’m getting to the Algerian War. Moktar sleeps while the others are smoking, and then, while another character calls out for his father, Moktar dreams of Algeria [voit en Algérie]. He sees kids in a village, massacres. There’s a kid who’s in front of the body of his father. Things he saw as a soldier, which he remembers. I needed this scene, which takes place in a very short time period. The story will extend over six months. That’s what interests me, it’s my preoccupation, and it was the preoccupation of Milton Caniff. That’s the pleasure that one can get from reading Milton Caniff. It’s like the pleasure of the cinema enthusiast who watches a French film: it’s the way it was shot, what’s behind the making of it.

McKinney: What’s the pleasure of Forton, for example, for you today? You’ve mentioned Forton to me before. He liked the good life and was an anarchistic cartoonist. What remains, and why Forton?32

Boudjellal: It’s the insolence, a real insolence. He dared to bring out [balancer] characters like the Pieds-Nickelés, who were crooks (Figure 12). One could perfectly well rework them today, with Sarkozy and Alliot-Marie.33 They’re timeless characters, and they’re not over and done with either, because there are authors who are using them. In fact, I might do a Pieds-Nickelés story too,

32 Louis Forton (1879–1934) was a famous cartoonist best known today for his Pieds-Nickelés [Lead- foot Gang, or Lazybones Trio] series, begun in 1908, about three crooks who travel the world looking for the easy life. The series was continued by several cartoonists, most notably Pellos (René Pellerin; 1900–1998; see below). 33 Nicolas Sarkozy (b. 1955) is the right-wing president of France (2007–2012) and Michèle Alliot- Marie (b. 1946) was a minister continously from 2002 to 2011 under presidents Jacques Chirac and then Sarkozy. 24 mark mckinney

Figure 12: The three Pieds-Nickelés characters (Croquignol, Filochard and Riboul– dingue), here impersonating the French Minister of Colonies and his aides in sub-Saharan Africa as they drink a toast with a local French colonial official, happily hoodwink and steal from people at home in France and abroad. Boudjellal admires the insolence of Louis Forton, their creator, who poked fun at almost everyone (but especially those with power and wealth), including his own characters. From Les Nouvelles Aventures des Pieds-Nickelés, t. 10: La Vie est belle [‘The New Adventures of the Leadfoot Gang’, vol. 10, ‘Life is Beautiful’] (Paris: Société Parisienne d’Édition, 1949 because they’ve moved into the public domain.34 Nothing would prevent me from doing so if I wanted to make a Pieds-Nickelés adventure. I think it’s one of the first comic strips of that importance to move into the public domain in France. I would like to talk with Gérald Forton, his grandson, to find out whether he has any photographs.35 But then again it’s important to stay free. I don’t at all feel like doing something with a really rigorous historical precision. I don’t feel capable of that. I need fantasy. But I’ve always been a fan of the Pieds-Nickelés. McKinney: Since when? Boudjellal: Oh, forever. I first discovered the Pieds-Nickelés of Pellos, but now I like the Pieds-Nickelés of Forton, and realise that it’s better and really irrev- erent. In Les Ritals Cavanna talks about the Pieds-Nickelés of Pellos in a really contemptuous way, because for him only the Pieds-Nickelés of Forton count.36 He doesn’t want to have anything to do with the Pieds-Nickelés of Pellos.

34 Comics do not enter the public domain in France until seventy years after the death of their creator (and in some cases postponement is possible). 35 Gérald Forton (b. 1931) is the grandson of Louis Forton and an accomplished cartoonist who moved to California to continue his work on comics. 36 François Cavanna (b. 1923) is a cartoonist and writer best known for his autobiographical works, including Les Ritals (the title ironically features a slang, sometimes derogatory, term for ‘Italians’), in which he recounts his childhood in a working-class, Franco-Italian milieu (his father was Italian and his mother French). He is also known for his contribution to Hara-Kiri and (after its demise) Charlie Hebdo, satirical periodicals that mix comics, cartoons and reporting. Interview with Farid Boudjellal 25

McKinney: There’s a book by Jean Tulard too, which has some errors, but in which he too says that he much prefers Forton to Pellos.37 Boudjellal: Pellos was a good cartoonist too. I knew Pellos, who was a charming old gentleman, and his wife. I even have some books that he inscribed for me. He drew the Pieds-Nickelés in them for me. He was also an immensely good cartoonist. He’s the one who drew Futuropolis.38

A Catalogue raisonné of Farid Boudjellal’s Comic Books L’Oud [‘The Lute’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 1983). L’Oud, t. 2, Le Gourbi [vol. 2: ‘The Hovel’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 1985). Les Soirées d’Abdulah/Ratonnade [‘Abdulah’s Evenings/Lynching an Arab’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 1985). L’Oud, t. 3, Ramadân [vol. 3: ‘Ramadan’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 1988). Gags à l’harissa [‘Hot-Pepper Jokes’] (Geneva: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1989). L’Oud, La trilogie (Toulon: Soleil, 1996). Les Slimani [‘The Slimanis’], colour by Daniel C. Chambard et al., preface by Martine Lagardette (Cachan: Tartamudo, 2003). Boudjellal’s first single-authored book was L’Oud (1983), the initial volume in a triptych that also included Le Gourbi (1985) and Ramadân (1988). The three works, in black-and-white line drawing, constitute a powerful fiction about the daily life of an extended Algerian-French family, the Slimanis, who live in Toulon and Paris. During this period he also published Les Soirées d’Abdulah/ Ratonnade (1985), about the racist treatment of Algerian immigrant working men in France. All four works were collected together and republished in one volume, as L’Oud, La trilogie (1996). Gags à l’harissa gathers together several humorous short stories and jokes, drawn in black and white, that feature the Slimani family. They were republished in a colour version in Les Slimani, which also includes a helpful preface and some stories originally commissioned for and published in a manga magazine in Japan. Jambon-Beur: Les Couples mixtes [‘Ham-Butter/Beur: Mixed Couples’], colour by Sophie Balland, articles by Martine Lagardette (Toulon: Soleil, 1995). Petit Polio, t. 1 [‘Little Polio’, vol. 1] (Toulon: Soleil, 1998). Petit Polio, t. 2 [‘Little Polio’, vol. 2] (Toulon: Soleil, 1999). Petit Polio, t. 3, Mémé d’Arménie [‘Little Polio‘, vol. 3, ‘Grandma from Armenia’] (Toulon: Soleil, 2002). Mémé d’Arménie, afterword by Martine Lagardette (Paris: Futuropolis, 2006). Petit Polio, t. 1–2 (Paris: Futuropolis, 2006).

37 Jean Tulard, Les Pieds Nickelés de Louis Forton [‘The Pieds-Nickelés of Louis Forton’] (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008). 38 Pellos drew the science fiction series Futuropolis, scripted by Martial Cendres, 1937–1938. It is now considered a classic. 26 mark mckinney Les Années Ventoline [‘The Ventoline Years’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 2007). Boudjellal has published both a sequel, Jambon-Beur: Les Couples mixtes (set in 1961–1994), and a three-volume prequel, Petit Polio (set in 1958–1960), to his Slimani family trilogy. These four books focus to a considerable degree on the Algerian War (1954–1962) and its consequences for the North African community in France, then and now. The last volume of Petit Polio, first subtitled (subsequently entitled) Mémé d’Arménie, also deals with the memory of the Armenian genocide. The Petit Polio series was reissued in a smaller format by Futuropolis. Les Années Ventoline continues to follow one member of the Slimani family – Mahmoud, the eldest son – as he strug- gles with asthma, which gives the title to the volume (Ventoline is a brand name of salbutamol or albuterol, a bronchodilating medicine prescribed for the illness). Meta-reflection on the medium of comics is an important theme throughout the Petit Polio series and continues in Les Années Vento- line. Boudjellal is currently drawing a sequel to the latter, entitled Le Cousin harki. Juif-Arabe, t. 1 [‘Jew-Arab’, vol. 1], colour by Brigitte Bontempi (Toulon: Soleil, 1990). Juif-Arabe, t. 2, Intégristes [‘Jew-Arab’, vol. 2, ‘Fundamentalists’], colour by Brigitte Bontempi (Toulon: Soleil, 1990). Juif-Arabe, t. 3, Conférence internationale [‘Jew-Arab’, vol. 3 ‘International Confe- rence’], colour by Brigitte Bontempi (Toulon: Soleil, 1991). Juif-Arabe, t. 4, Français [‘Jew-Arab’, vol. 4, ‘French’] (Toulon: Soleil, 1992). Juif-Arabe, L’Intégrale [‘Jew-Arab’, Complete Works] (Toulon: Soleil, 1996). Juif-Arabe, L’Intégrale (Paris: Futuropolis, 2006). The four volumes of this series take a light-hearted approach to serious problems confronting Jews, Muslim Arabs, Catholics and many others in France. The main characters are two couples of fundamentalist Muslim (of Algerian heritage) and Jewish parents, and their more secular-minded children. A fundamentalist Catholic priest also enters the picture. The stories range from one-page cartoons to multi-page stories. All function according to the main principle of humorous French comics: each has a surprise ending that is a joke [un gag], which usually then elucidates the (often double) meaning of its title. Djinn [‘Genie’], colour by Farid Boudjellal and Sophie Mondésir (Toulon: Label Or, 1992). Les Contes du djinn [‘Tales of the Genie’], colour by Daniel Chambard, cover by Leïla Leïz (Toulon: Soleil, 2005). Les Contes du djinn: Hadj Moussa, t. 1, Le Fils du fossoyeur [‘Tales of the Genie: Hadj Moussa’, vol. 1, ‘The Gravedigger’s Son’], script by Farid Boudjellal, artwork by Leïla Leïz (Toulon: Soleil, 2005). Les Contes du djinn: Hadj Moussa, t. 2, La Rupture [‘Tales of the Genie: Hadj Interview with Farid Boudjellal 27

Moussa’, vol. 2, ‘The Rupture’], script by Farid Boudjellal, artwork by Leïla Leïz (Toulon: Soleil, 2008). Djinn, republished as Les Contes du djinn, begins a story cycle focusing on Hadj Moussa, an Algerian whose life begins at an unspecified moment in colonial-era Algeria and extends up to the present (the first and last pages of the volume prominently feature a digital watch). Hadj Moussa is trapped by a djinn (‘genie’) who inhabits his body, creating a doubling or schizophrenic splitting of consciousness within him. In the two subsequent volumes, Le Fils du fossoyeur and La Rupture, Hadj Moussa leads the reader on an explo- ration of colonial Algerian society, up to the First World War. The fantastic, doubling and dreams are central features of this series. Anita comix, with José Jover and Roland Monpierre (Paris: Arcantère, 1984). Les Beurs [‘The Arabs’], script by Farid Boudjellal, artwork by Larbi Mechkour (Paris: L’Écho des Savanes / Albin Michel, 1985). Black-Blanc-Beur: Les Folles Années de l’intégration [‘Black, White, Arab: The Crazy Years of Integration’], songs by André Igwal (Cachan: Tartamudo, 2004). These three volumes comprise humour-based collaborative work that Boud­­ jellal produced in the 1980s. Anita comix is a black-and-white compilation of comics collectively drawn and scripted by Boudjellal, José Jover and Roland Monpierre (see above, n. 12). The protagonists of some of the stories form a trio consisting of the fictional doubles of the authors, but drawn as ethnic stereo- types: Boudjellal as a knife-wielding, carpet-selling Arab, Jover as a matador or a Spanish tourist, and Monpierre as a spear-throwing black cannibal. Les Beurs, drawn by Larbi Mechkour (a French cartoonist of Algerian heritage) and scripted by Boudjellal, infuses North African fantasy (flying carpets, trickster figures, genies and magic lamps) into stories about immigrant minorities in working-class French suburbs. The book was republished in Black Blanc Beur: Les Folles Années de l’intégration, which also includes a collection of stories featuring a Maghrebi-French child ­protagonist named ‘Aziz Bricolo’ [‘Aziz “Fixit”’] – who is adept at repairing machines – and his young friends. The story, drawn by Mechkour and scripted by Boudjellal and Jover, was published in the left-aligned children’s magazine Pif Gadget. Black Blanc Beur also includes a helpful preface by Martine Lagardette.

Ethnik ta mère [‘Ethnic/Screw Your Mother’], script by Farid Boudjellal, artwork by Thierry Jollet (Toulon: Soleil, 1996). Le Beurgeois [‘The Beurgeois’], colour by Johanna Schipper (Toulon: Soleil, 1997). These two works are humour-based explorations of French society in the 1990s, viewed respectively from the bottom and the top. Ethnik ta mère features an ethnically mixed trio (black, white and Maghrebi) of teenage 28 mark mckinney boys living in a housing project in a working-class French suburb. The title of each short story is a variation on the insult ‘nique ta mère’ [‘screw your mother’], popularised in France at the time. Focusing on the top end of French society, Le Beurgeois is a biting social satire about how an ambitious Algerian-French entrepreneur figuratively storms the Bastille and purchases the Versailles of modern-day French society. Hanna et Chloë [‘Hanna and Chloë’], with Fraco, Tobias Deicke and Mawil (Cachan: Tartamudo / Paris: CEMEA, 2004). Le Chien à trois pattes [‘The Three-Legged Dog’] (Cachan: Tartamudo, 2005). La Mémoire du quartier [‘The Memory of the Neighbourhood’], script by Farid Boudjellal and Martin Lagardette, artwork by Farid Boudjellal and Leïla Leïz, colour by Fouzia Chakour and Daniel Chambard, with Geneviève Bury (Gennevilliers: OPMHLM de Gennevilliers, 2007). These three books represent a form of art that cartoonists have often produced in order to support themselves: works created in response to orders placed by individuals or institutions to meet specific needs, whether commercial or otherwise. In this case, the institutions include, respectively, the Office Franco-Allemand pour la Jeunesse [‘Franco-German Office for Youth’], Groupe Logement 47 [‘Housing Group 47’] and OPMHLM de Gennevilliers (Office Public Municipal des Habitations de l’Habitat – Habitation à Loyer Modéré de Gennevilliers) [‘Municipal Public Housing Office – Moderate Rent Housing of Gennevilliers’]. One of the things that distinguishes Boudjellal’s work in this genre is that it continues his long practice of creating socially conscious comics and cartoons, which he has often done in other forms too (e.g., posters encouraging young people of immigrant heritage to vote, or in support of civil rights marches). The three books are meant to foster under- standing and cooperation between and within communities, at the local (Le Chien à trois pattes, La Mémoire du quartier) and the international (Hanna et Chloë) levels. La Mémoire du quartier does this in part through a comics story featuring Boudjellal’s Slimani family characters. À suivre … [To be continued …] Comic Art and Commitment: An Interview with Morvandiau Ann Miller*

Abstract This interview with political cartoonist and comics artist Morvandiau focuses mainly on his 2007 comic book D’Algérie. After the murder in 1994 of his Uncle Jean, a père blanc [‘white father’] in Tizi Ouzou, along with three of his fellow priests, followed by the failed suicide of his father, a Pied-noir, eight years later, Morvandiau decided to carry out research into his family and its links with France’s colonial adventure. Through the resources of the comic art medium, he was able to give form to a story which is both personal and public (Figures 1–2). The subtle and sober portrayal of his search for identity is contextualised by a highly absorbing panorama of political events. In the interview, he explains some of the aesthetic choices that he made, and discusses the challenges of working from documentary material, and how he drew on the resources of the medium to tackle issues of individual and collective identity.

Miller: Thank you for agreeing to answer the questions put by European Comic Art. I would like to begin by asking you about D’Algérie, an extraordinary work both in terms of its subject matter and its demonstration of the potential of the medium. It’s clear that you’ve amassed a considerable amount of documenta- tion. In the book you carefully redraw documents of all kinds: family photo- graphs, orientalising archival photographs, press images, including some photographs that have had limited circulation or have simply been suppressed (Figures 3–7). You could have included the original photographs instead of redrawing them. But in this work of ‘postmemory’, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term,1 you chose not to reproduce any photographs. What do you feel to be the effect of the transformation of these photos into drawings, and does that effect vary according to the type of photo?

* Interview conducted and translated by Ann Miller. 1 Hirsch defines postmemory as: ‘the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their births, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic experiences that can neither be understood nor recreated.’ See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 22. European Comic Art 4.1 (2011) doi:10.3828/eca.2011.7 106 ann miller An Interview with Morvandiau 107

Figures 1–2: Memories of a visit to Algeria at the age of thirteen, and, six years later, the shock as Morvandiau learns of his uncle’s murder. 108 ann miller An Interview with Morvandiau 109

Figures 3–4: Morvandiau’s great grandparents, who settled in Algeria in 1907, and General Bugeaud, who, as Governor of Algeria from 1840, had inaugurated the policy of ‘razzias’, the brutal raids which subjugated the country. 110 ann miller Morvandiau: The decision to ‘redraw’ these photos was determined by two separate but related factors. First, it was an aesthetic choice, a way of integrating these images in a homogenous way into the drawn text that I aimed to create. And then, more symbolically, it was a way for me to appropriate these stories: those about my family and those about the relationship between France and Algeria (History with a capital H) – which was largely unknown to me before I began to work on the book. By its nature, memory itself works according to the principle of reinterpretation. When I drew these images I made no attempt to hide their documentary and memorial status (it is clear from the arrange- ment of layout, subjects and shadows cast that these are photographs). The reader is not taken in by these borrowed images, far from it, but I wanted the reading process to be propelled by a certain harmony of form and content. In the different types of photographs, from historical sources or the family album, there is a resonance that arises out of traces of collective memory (for example, General de Gaulle raising his arms) and/or out of the evocation of memories and emotions that are common to all of us (family albums are a widespread format). Everything passes through the filter of my drawing. Miller: Your work can be compared to that of Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi, in the sense that it involves giving artistic form to a transgenerational heritage. Would you say that your project resembles that of Spiegelman or Satrapi in any way? Morvandiau: These references are a little overwhelming, but, from a strictly thematic point of view, I would maintain that D’Algérie belongs to the same family. Maus was one of the books which marked my adolescence, at the begin- ning of the 1990s, not only because it was recounted in the form of a comic, but because of its subject matter. In France, that period also coincided with the emergence of alternative publishing houses and a very stimulating flowering of creativity. Given that they were asking questions about their identity, their heritage and how these related to contemporary reality, it seems to me not insignificant that both Spiegelman and Satrapi developed these themes within a publishing structure of the same type (even if the French edition of Maus was later brought out by Flammarion), set up as a reaction against the publishing context of comic art at that time, more concerned with entertainment than critical reflection. Miller: By using the resources of the medium (framing, reframing, layout, juxta- position, text/image dissonance, repetition/variation, to name but a few), you succeed not only in evoking a collective imaginary but also in giving visibility to its blind spots, its unconscious. Do you think that comic art is particularly well suited to accounting for both what can be said and what remains unsaid? Morvandiau: Principles such as the juxtaposition of images in a sequence or the relationship between text and image sound straightforward, but, in practice, An Interview with Morvandiau 111

Figure 5: The orientalist postcards that influenced Morvandiau’s grandfather, Paul, followed by Napoleon III, Emperor of France 1852–1870, who presided over the consoli- dation of colonial rule under a military regime. 112 ann miller An Interview with Morvandiau 113

Figures 6 and 7: A history that has been suppressed, and an image that has become iconic. 114 ann miller

Figure 8: Morvandiau’s preliminary sketches of the layout of the last part of D’Algérie. allow for a complex range of possibilities and ways of combining visual effects and creating multiple meanings. I have for a long time been an admirer of the humour of artists like Glen Baxter and Gary Larson who, outside comic art, have developed an infallible mechanism for generating absurdity which is entirely based on the text/image relation. Moreover, the silent political comic strips of the great Willem (e.g., those that have been brought out in a collection by Requins Marteaux under the title of Éliminations [‘Eliminations’])2 – which are also inspired by photographs – produce sequences that are at the same time very precise and open to a number of interpretations. For someone working on the collective imaginary, dominant discourses or ideology – all characterised by what can be said and what must be left unsaid – the potential offered by comic art is extraordinary, as much in relation to the analytical decoding as in the effect produced. The power of ellipsis, associated with the variations in the rhythmic potential of the regular grid, gives comic art an evocative and sugges- tive capacity that I would readily compare to poetry and music. My method of work as a comic artist consists in general of letting a project evolve slowly and develop a certain tonality (by reflecting, taking notes, undertaking research when this is appropriate …) before carrying out the work of production in a relatively short space of time. For D’Algérie, after four years of elaboration, I conceived and drew most of the pages in a little over three months, at a rate of 15 hours a day. This intensive rhythm put me into a state of physical tension and fatigue that allowed me, paradoxically, to achieve a kind of mental openness

2 Willem, Éliminations (Albi: Requins Marteaux, 2002). An Interview with Morvandiau 115 and state of relaxation. Once I had got on top of the documentary evidence, and once I had defined a very precise tonality, I threw myself into it, doing the page breakdown as I went along without, in fact, knowing exactly how many pages the finished book would have. It’s a method that tries to combine control and spontaneity, and sometimes allows for unpremeditated ideas and formal elements to emerge (Figure 8). Miller: You appear within the narrative as a character only during the first part of the book, before plunging the reader back into history, and then again at the end. The Morvandiau of the year 2002, an angry young man who blurts out the story of his father’s failed suicide to the garage owner who baulks at reimbursing him for the empty gas canister, seems to be somehow redeemed by his decision to try to understand the wider story: the smirk gives way, on the page underneath, to the seriousness of the artist at his drawing board. Is it reasonable to read this episode as a mise en abyme of your artistic project (Figures 9–10)? Morvandiau: I hadn’t particularly analysed this scene from that angle, which offers further proof that the artist doesn’t control everything! On the other hand, since you refer to the ‘smirk which gives way to seriousness’, my stance on humour was clear in my mind from the outset. Most of my other books, and my press cartoons, are in a humorous register. For D’Algérie, using this register would have seemed too facile and evasive in relation to the seriousness of the subject matter that I was dealing with. I am nonetheless convinced that any subject can potentially be the subject of humour, as long as it is relevant to the point that is being made. Miller: The final page is beautiful and mysterious.3 On the double page that precedes the end, the image of Le Pen’s mouth, a gaping wound, seems to symbolise the historical scar that doesn’t heal (Figure 11). On turning the final page, the reader finds you at the age of ten, insisting, in the face of the amaze- ment of your classmate, that because your father comes from Algeria he must be an Arab. Does this come from a desire to find yourself, along with your family, on the side of the ‘good guys’? And was this retrospective and utopian (at least on the personal level) reversal the only way to resolve the long history of France’s relationship with Algeria? Morvandiau: This concluding page had its origin quite simply in a memory and a genuine confusion that I suffered from, as a child, about Pieds-noirs. Since my father had been born in Algeria, how could he not be an Arab? I remember quite clearly being convinced that there was no way he couldn’t be. Of course, by echoing the rather enigmatic wording of the title, ‘D’Algérie’, this

3 We are not reproducing this page, preferring to leave readers the pleasure of discovering it for themselves in the book. 116 ann miller An Interview with Morvandiau 117

Figures 9–10: The smirk gives way to the artist at work, in the same bottom right-hand corner position. 118 ann miller episode enabled me to gain some perspective on issues of identity, individual and collective, past and present, that preceded the creation of this book. I don’t know if there could be a ‘resolution’ of the history of France’s relationship with Algeria but it seems clear that artistic expression has a role to play in making it possible to speak of this. Miller: You didn’t feel the need to go to Algeria and carry out research there: instead, you chose to reconstruct the country from memories (your own, relating to a journey undertaken with your family at the age of thirteen, and those of people close to you) and from archival documents. Do you feel that you were creating a parallel, hybrid, fantasised country, or was the concern for fidelity in the restitution of a history that has been in part suppressed upper- most in your mind? Morvandiau: Just like the researchers in the human sciences whose work I drew on when I was searching for documents (from Pierre Bourdieu to Germaine Tillion, and including numerous historians), I wanted above all to be very clear with myself and my readers about who I am and where I’m speaking from. I tried to link my personal involvement, the work of memory within my family, and established historical facts, with the detachment needed for understanding … a sort of participatory comic! Not neutral but not gullible either, a foothold on the inside, but with no feeling of nostalgia and no need to justify anything whatsoever in the decisions taken by ancestors that I never knew. I think that this is partly to do with a generational issue: what are the consequences of those historical events for us, members of French society today? And I would add that I’m still very wary about expressing myself on the topic of contempo- rary Algeria, because, although I’m interested in it. I quite simply can’t claim to know it. In October 2010, I was invited to a festival of comic art in Algiers … it was decidedly odd to be walking around in this city that I had drawn from colonial postcards and from a 1988 home movie! Miller: It’s easy to imagine that this work of remembering (on the individual, family and political levels) must sometimes have been difficult and painful. How was the book received? What was it like experiencing the reactions of your family, the Pied-noir community and Algerian readers? Morvandiau: Contrary to what one might imagine, working on the book was lengthy, and not without problems, but not painful. Even though my father is not especially talkative, there is – as far as I know! – no particular taboo about Algeria in my family (given that my father was not conscripted to serve in Algeria during the War of Independence, unlike a lot of men of his generation, who often maintained a total silence about the experience on their return). The feedback that I get from readers is generally positive – readers rarely contact you to tell you that they hate your work! A lot of people who are not part of the An Interview with Morvandiau 119

Figure 11: Le Pen’s mouth, symbolising the gaping wound that has not healed. 120 ann miller traditional comics readership, which I am delighted about, have been touched by the theme because of the resonance that it has for them (Pieds-noirs, children of Pieds-noirs, French people of Algerian origin, people who had done voluntary service in Algeria,4 people whose fathers had served in the army in Algeria …). Miller: My reflexes as a teacher make me home in on the potential use of your book as teaching material. It is easy to imagine it appearing on a school or university syllabus. Is this something that would worry you? Morvandiau: No, not really, because my historical references seem solid and the intent is very clear. The book has in fact already given rise to a number of meetings and discussions in schools, festivals or, for example, an invitation from a Berber community organisation in Rennes. Miller: On the internet site dedicated to this book (http://dalgerie.over-blog. com/) you quote Benjamin Stora’s views on the ‘invisible war’ which has been ravaging Algeria since the 1990s. It is well known that some Algerian comics artists have been murdered and others have had to go into exile. Is comic art (whether from Algeria or elsewhere) capable of making this war visible? Morvandiau: The war of the 1990s seems to me a very thorny topic, because, as far as I know, and to be brutally frank, it is difficult to understand exactly who was killing whom. A cartoon by Willem (again!) seems to me to be very pertinent and very witty on this topic. Under the title ‘Algeria: Spot the Differ- ence’, he presents six characters out of whom the first five are blindfolded and labelled ‘Good Islamist’, ‘Bad Islamist’, Criminal Element’, ‘Good Member of the Security Forces’. The sixth, the victim, quite simply has no head. Miller: In your blog entry for 19 February 2008, you write as follows: ‘The notion of commitment – often used in a confining and limiting way – seems to me, because of this common usage, ambiguous and inadequate. That is why the terms TONALITY and POINT OF VIEW seem to me more relevant and more open’. I would like to ask you if you had proposed this definition of a non-confining commitment to the artists who contributed to the special supplement of Le Mode diplomatique, or if you used it as a criterion for selec- tion. If you keep to this guideline, it seems to me that you leave quite a lot of work for the reader to do. Can this be frustrating for him/her? Morvandiau: I didn’t set it as a strict guideline but it was certainly in that spirit that I drew up a list of potential authors for Le Monde diplomatique. The main pitfall to avoid seemed to lie in asking political activists to produce comic art … which, creatively speaking, would have resulted in our receiving stories that

4 The French term ‘coopérants’ refers to people who took the option of working (as teachers, for example) in a former French colony or another foreign country as an alternative to doing military service, until military conscription was suspended in France beginning in 1997. An Interview with Morvandiau 121 had a ‘message’ to put across. In other words, monolithic dogmatism instead of living creativity! We preferred to put our trust in authors who had developed their own individual universe, and therefore who were able, by virtue of that and on a topic of their choosing, to offer a personal and critical outlook on the world. Of course, this choice demands an effort from the reader, who may sometimes feel frustrated but also challenged and startled, especially since this is a collective work full of very different ideas. Moreover, the reader who feels frustrated will, I hope, have the interest and the perseverance to go back over something not immediately understood, or to go and look for other books by a particular author. Miller: In D’Algérie as well, you use the term ‘tonality’ in a reference to the project that you formulated, at the age of twenty, of producing a story about your Uncle Jean, and you insert, as an example of successful tonality, a four-page comic about a visit to New York. Between two picture-postcard images of the mythical city, the reader is confronted with a more disillusioned vision: close-ups on street signs expressing prohibitions and exclusions, faces and bodies worn down by resignation, patriotic slogans that seem strangely threatening (Figure 12). There has been something of a boom recently in travel diaries in comics form. But, with a few exceptions (Guy Delisle, for example), mythologising seems to be more in evidence than a detachment and distancing ‘tonality’. Would you be tempted to take up this first travel diary again and extend it? Morvandiau: Like autobiography before it, comics reportage is on the way to becoming a fashion that generates the worst kind of ersatz. I don’t currently have any specific project in relation to a travel diary. I’ve got several ideas on the go, based on different registers and genres. Miller: After D’Algérie, you returned to the register of humour and, especially, parody. It’s tempting to imagine that this allows you to work in a light-hearted mood and even with a certain facility. But this is probably a mistaken impres- sion. Is the creation of humorous comic art actually a painful process? Morvandiau: The idea for one of the books in my bibliography came to me when I was drunk and a bit depressed, but I think of myself in general as someone who has a happy nature, for whom the romantic myth of the tortured artist holds little fascination! The book that I wrote after D’Algérie – Santa Riviera, le venin des passions [‘Saint Riviera, Poisonous Passions’] was fun to write and at times a really good laugh. Miller: What is happening with Périscopages? I have read that the future of this organisation, which represents a certain idea of the relationship between the artist and his/her readers, is under threat. Can you give us an idea of the principles underpinning Périscopages, and the difficulties that you’ve had to deal with? 122 ann miller

Figure 12: New York: a distancing tonality. An Interview with Morvandiau 123

Morvandiau: Périscopages is a series of events devoted to auteurist comic art and independent presses. Just like the alternative publishing houses that were set up in the 1990s, it was born out of the desire of authors to have events that corresponded to their conception of the medium: artistically demanding and international, convivial and studiously laid back. Concretely, every year in May, it puts on several free exhibitions in Rennes over a period of three weeks, and there are high points like the Independent Comic Art Conference (four days of debates, round table discussions and shows), and the twenty-four hours of comic art and radio. The difficulties that we are experiencing concern finance – the organisation depends on public subsidies, a strong alternative network and a certain amount of self-financing – but they are also symbolic: the immediate local visibility anticipated by certain interest groups has not always been proportionate to the background work put in over the last ten years. Miller: More generally, how do you see the future of independent comics presses? Morvandiau: Leaving aside the artistic developments brought about by the alternative presses – which have shaken up the publishing scene for the last twenty years but whose innovations have now been commercially absorbed by the mainstream, it seems clear to me that independent publishers are going to have to be imaginative in relation to their economic functioning and their means of distribution. In the comics sector, more than 5,000 titles come out every year in France! For anyone who thinks that creativity and discovery are important, this is simply absurd, and it contributes to the undermining of all those involved in independent book production, all those who open up space for unconventional viewpoints.

Postscript For examples of Morvandiau’s work, see: http://dalgerie.over-blog.com/ http://www.periscopages.org/ http://grandpapier.org/morvandiau/?lang=fr http://www.morvandiau-tanitoc.net/site/ Mémoires d’un commercial [‘Memories of a Business’] (Albi: Les Requins Marteaux, 2003). (with David Vandermeulen), Le Cid: version 6.0 [‘El Cid, version 6’] (Paris: Rackham, 2004). Malin Molière [‘Malingnant Molière’] (Poitiers: FLBLB, 2006). D’Algérie [‘From Algeria’] (Rennes: Homecooking Books, 2007). Santa Riviera [‘Saint Riviera’] (Albi: Les Requins Marteaux, 2010). Les Affaires reprennent [‘Back to Business’] (Albi: Les Requins Marteaux, 2010). Interview with Baru: Part 1

Mark McKinney

Abstract Hervé Barulea (b. 1947), known as Baru, is a French cartoonist of Italian and Breton heritage, who has spent much of his life in the metalworking region around Nancy, in northeastern France, his birthplace. He outlines his approach to comics, beginning with his vision of comics as essentially being images that speak to primal human urges. He finds this kind of imagery today mainly in American movies and novels, but not so much in American comics. He describes his tenure as president of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée [‘International Festival of Comics’] in Angoulême in January 2011, after having won the grand prize for his career’s work in comics at the same festival in 2010. Baru then speaks of his approach to history and current events in his comics. He outlines how he has depicted immigrants of European and African heritage in his comics, and then explains why he has often returned to the Algerian War. Baru ends this first half of the interview by describing his views of the French Communist Party, and explaining his critical depiction of it in Les années Spoutnik [‘The Spoutnik Years’].

A Brief Introduction to the Author and His Work1 Baru’s comics offer some of the most compelling representations in comics of the working class in twentieth- and twenty-first-century France. His gritty stories focus mostly on the dreams and struggles of young people from the working class in the metalworking regions of northeastern France. He is the only cartoonist so far to have twice won the best book prize at the French national comics festival, in Angoulême – in 1991, for Le Chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’],2 which he made together with Jean-Marc Thévenet and

1 Interview conducted and translated by Mark McKinney. The introduction, footnotes, illustration captions and bibliography of Baru’s works are by Mark McKinney. The editors warmly thank Baru for his generous willingness to be interviewed, and for having kindly provided the illustrations and permission to reproduce them here. Publication of the second half of this interview with the cartoonist is planned for European Comic Art 5.1 (June 2012). 2 For full references to all of Baru’s comic books mentioned in the interview, please see the biblio­ graphy at the end of the interview. Readers are also encouraged to consult the following chapter European Comic Art 4.2 (2011) doi:10.3828/eca.2011.16 214 mark mckinney Daniel Ledran, and in 1996, for L’Autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’]. Both works feature a young man of Algerian heritage as the main protagonist, and both figure the relationship of France to its colonial history in Algeria.3 Baru’s personal itinerary has been tightly bound up with that history: for example, as a youth he personally witnessed internecine fighting between different Algerian factions in his working-class neighbourhood in Lorraine during the Algerian War (he alludes to this in both Vive la classe! [‘Long Live the Draftees!’] and Les Années Spoutnik) and he performed his civil service in Algeria after the war, in lieu of serving in the French army. Baru’s own mixed, French and Italian immigrant, working-class heritage has given him unique insight into the potential opportunities and the difficulties that the ‘les damnés de la terre’ [‘the wretched of the earth’] have faced in France, and continue to confront today. Baru is one of France’s foremost cartoonists, as was indicated by the grand prize that he received at Angoulême in January 2010. Among his many works, Le Chemin de l’Amérique is the only one to have been translated into English so far: it was released by Drawn and Quarterly, but unfortunately has been allowed to go out of print.

The Interview McKinney: What are comics for you? Baru: Comics are not a language or form of writing as usually defined, that is a group of abstract signs whose association produces meaning through their interpretation by the brain. The image cannot be read in that way. There’s something other than signs in an image, and one cannot approach it solely through a deciphering mode. There’s a globality and an immediacy in the image that hark back more to an archaic and pre-rational way of perceiving things. Without wanting to overstate the comparison, it’s a bit like in voodoo, where there’s an experience that’s certainly spiritual but isn’t lived in a symbolic mode, rather in one that’s emotional, physical, carnal, quasi-physiological. Something that’s haunted me since I began making comics is why some people claim that they can’t manage to read one. Of course the main reason is that comics are so ill thought of from a cultural standpoint that there are a lot of folks who want above all to avoid losing their cultural standing by admit- ting that they associate with them. They have chosen to turn away from those images and towards words [le verbe], because words hold the highest position,

by Baru: ‘The Working Class and Comics: A French Cartoonist’s Perspective’, in Mark McKinney (ed.), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 239–257. That chapter includes bibliographical references not duplicated here (previous interviews, etc.). 3 France conquered the capital city of Algiers in 1830 and ultimately the entire country. Algeria was eventually incorporated administratively into France as three départements. The Algerian War began on 1 November 1954 and ended in 1962 with the formal independence of Algeria. Interview with Baru: Part 1 215

especially in the cultures that have developed out of the great monotheistic religions. In literature, for example, that leads to a frenzied taste for style and refinement in language, one of the pitfalls of contemporary French literature. By contrast, my taste leads me to a literature that deals with the question of style by simply putting it in the service of images capable of igniting the imagi- nation of the one who receives them. In general, I find that among American authors, whom I read exclusively; I’m thinking especially of Russell Banks. For me his masterpiece is Continental Drift.4 It’s truly magnificent, one of his most beautiful novels. I greatly prefer it to The Sweet Hereafter,5 which is better known, at least in France. But I find it also in Cormac McCarthy, an author with a powerful lyricism, who summons up sumptuous images, and also among authors of detective fiction [de roman noir]: Dennis Lehane in Boston, George Pelecanos in Washington and James Lee Burke in the South. McKinney: What are your tastes in American comics? Baru: The problem with American comics is that for a long time there was this superhero imperialism to which I never pled allegiance. I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with America: I don’t like American politics, but I’m forced to admit that in any case I’m shaped by American-ness. I only listen to rock and roll and the only novelists that I read are American. Moreover, American cinema has produced people such as Scorcese, who for me is a god-like figure, and at the other end of the spectrum there’s Jim Jarmusch. For me these are cornerstones. So I cultivate this paradox: from a political perspec- tive, I’m angry with the United States, and from a cultural point of view I’m filled with admiration. But maybe the culture that I get from the United States isn’t the culture of the majority of Americans. Maybe it isn’t the culture of the people who brought Bush to power. I’m using the term culture in a general way, because even a photo-novella or a video-game console are cultural activities. So coming back to the relationship that I can have with American comics, I was of course taken with the whole wave of American underground comics, begin- ning with Shelton and the Freak Brothers, Griffiths at that time, and especially Crumb and Spiegelman. McKinney: At what point in time? Baru: It was in the 1970s, through Actuel, because Actuel published that.6 That’s where I discovered Robert Crumb. I sided with their project [ces propositions], of course, but not in a referential manner. By that I mean that when I started to make comics, it was much later – ten years after – and so I avoided servile

4 Russell Banks, Continental Drift (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). 5 Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 6 Actuel was a French magazine that became known in its new format beginning in 1970 in part for its connections to American underground culture, including comics by cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. 216 mark mckinney copying. It was simply an interesting project, especially one that was different from the superheroes, and that suited me perfectly. Later on I was attuned to what happened with Burns, at the beginning, and then Dan Clowes, and David Mazzucchelli when he escaped from the superheroes. And then Adrian Tomine, and some with the Canadians, with Seth. But I have the impression that something happened in the United States: a kind of conformism that set in, especially among those called ‘independents’, even if the term is a bit stupid. Unfortunately I think it was the Chris Ware syndrome. He had so much success, including abroad, that maybe all the Americans felt obliged to wallow in a kind of minimalism and abandon the image that I was discussing earlier: sensorial, shaped by urges, hormones, sexuality and things that drip. No doubt with the exception of Burns. So they produced an academism made of images that are dry, white and entirely in the service of words [le verbe]. Take Dan Clowes, for example: I loved the first ones that he made, and then I found his Wilson to be insufferable, because all of a sudden the text has the upper hand there.7 Asterios Polyp, by Mazzucchelli, was for me a real let-down.8 How did this powerfully baroque artist manage to drift into this writing that’s abstract, dry and stiff as theory? Having said that, I recognise that even if I don’t accept the graphic stance, the project is still exceptional. And come to think of it, I realise that this movement toward abstraction was already far along in City of Glass. But for me that isn’t going in the right direction, all the more so because that form of comics prevails now here in Europe too, since the Association. It foregrounds speech [le verbe], the word, to generate meaning, to the detri- ment of the image, which is reduced to being fetishistic little drawings [des petits dessins gris-gris], in black and white. I find it unfortunate to reduce comics to that dimension, because it means going towards their drying up. We then only read comics with the part of the brain that’s attuned to abstraction, the concept, the word [le verbe], to the detriment of the side that’s a little bit flabby [gras] and sometimes obscene. I’m not saying that one has to draw obscenities, but the somewhat frightening side that an image can have when it triggers an emotional shock should be at the center of research in comics. Because that’s where the specificity of our medium is located. If one looks closely, cinema is a bit like that: someone like David Lynch, for example, who – like Blutch, to whom I often compare him – offers images that knock your socks off, but who, unfortunately, is tempted by hermeticism. I wonder what a non-hermetic Lynch could be … Because he can be like that: when he made The Straight Story, about an old man crossing America on his little riding lawn mower.9 For me that was a shock. I love that film, because there you know where you’re going,

7 Daniel Clowes, Wilson (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2010). 8 David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (New York: Pantheon, 2009). 9 David Lynch, The Straight Story (1999). Interview with Baru: Part 1 217 you understand what he’s doing, and what images! That’s what a total work can be. I sadly believe that American cartoonists are not up to the same standards as American novelists. In any case they don’t leave me in silent admiration like American filmmakers and writers do. I especially like detective fiction [la littérature noire] because it’s the literature of the contemporary world. It tries to decode the world as it is, with its instruments [outils],10 with its metaphors. It allows us to understand in an empathetic mode. We’re in phase with the characters, with the people who bustle about in there. In the detective novel there’s very little psychology, very little interiority. The characters are what they do. And when I make comics, I try to follow that track. That’s why Dan Clowes’s Wilson disappointed me, even if I still have a profound admiration for his work. Up till then he had given us images drawn with a scalpel. Here, by changing his graphic register at the whim of a formal fantasy, without a narrative neces- sity, there are no more words that slice. It’s a pity. Inversely, the Jimmy Corrigan of Chris Ware left me stone cold.11 Because as much as I find his script remark- able, I had the impression that I was reading a book and not a comic. I really regretted the fact that he took this minimalist stance, with these little images chock full of signs, all offset from their reference points [en décalage référentiel], with a stylistic choice that is so extended that it gobbles up the rest. It’s boring, cold. I couldn’t bring myself to read through to the end. They’ll say ‘Okay, it’s a form of white literature, without emotion’. Certainly, but that doesn’t hide the fact that you’re shut out. McKinney: Let’s speak about your presidency at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD) at Angoulême in 2011: what does that represent for you, for your vision of comics and of the world? Baru: It’s true that, normally, it’s the International Festival of Comics. But that already raises a problem: we still have trouble integrating Japanese comics. A lot of effort is expended, but the production is so massive and so mainstream that it’s hard, if you’re not a fan [amateur], to sort all those books out. So Japanese comics have trouble making it into the prize lists at Angoulême. There was a book that came to the fore this year, a thing called Pluto. But looked at objec- tively, what still continues to dominate at Angoulême is the core of Western comics. There are two worlds of comics: Europe and the United States on one hand, and Japan on the other. All the rest of Asia is towed along behind Japan, whatever the Koreans may think. For Europe, there’s what’s called the Franco- Belgian tradition, even if the category is completely outdated. So many bridges have been built between the United States and Europe, for example, or between

10 Baru used the term ‘outil/s’ (literally, ‘tool/s’) several times during the interview. I have translated it variously as ‘instrument/s’ and ‘resource/s’. 11 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000). 218 mark mckinney France and Italy, or between France, Belgium and Spain, etc, that one can’t really speak of Franco-Belgian comics anymore. All the more so because the field of what is possible in comics has been so extended over the last thirty or forty years that one can no longer discern a permanent practice aside from old things and their copies, in the style of the Belgian school, of the clear line, in any case in a strictly numeric sense of the number of books published. Because from a sales standpoint, these ‘old things’ no doubt largely remain dominant. So Angoulême is the big event in comics because it has managed to remain generalist. And I agree with this choice, because it’s certain that if I had created the whole program for Angoulême 2011, there wouldn’t have been 200,000 people who travelled to the event, but 200. It’s important to know that the president of the festival is only responsible for 10 or 15 per cent of the program- ming as such, and that his main job is to participate in the different juries during the event. Angoulême needs to remain eclectic, with Soleil, Delcourt, Dargaud, etc., and the small publishers. Whatever people say, that works pretty well. Even if the books that are brought to the public’s attention through the prize lists aren’t usually generalist. That always gets a bunch of people yelling, specifically those who think that the Tuniques Bleues [‘Blue Tunics’] or things like that are still the true comics.12 Sure, they are true comics. But Angoulême doesn’t need to give a prize to the fortieth volume of the Tuniques bleues. That wouldn’t have any rhyme or reason, because the readers have already voted with their wallets. It’s better to point out the things that are remarkable in their searching on the margins of the known field of comics, but remain sufficiently flexible to not be strictly (I hate this elitist word) ‘avant-gardist’, which is to say only select works that are cutting edge. For example, if there had only been Mazzucchelli clones on the prize lists this year that would have been a dumb move. But in fact the juries are put together in a relatively well-balanced manner – there are not only raving lunatics of the avant-garde on them – so that in the end they succeed in producing a brief snapshot of the current comics produc- tion that is generally pertinent. When bad things are designated it’s because the production has been bad. And when there are good things – and this year I believe that there were a lot of good things – the prize lists are always up to the level of the symbolic stakes that undergird this kind of practice. Otherwise, from a strictly personal viewpoint, the satisfaction that the presi- dency gave me is obvious. It allowed me to present my work in conditions that I hadn’t previously encountered, with an exhibition – conceived and put on by Phonem, a small communications agency run by friends – that I had named, tongue in cheek, ‘DLDDLT’, which is the acronym of ‘debout les damnés de la terre’ [‘Stand up you wretched of the Earth’].13 To make this humorous distance

12 Les Tuniques bleues [‘The Bluecoats’] is a series of comics originally serialised in Spirou magazine from 1968 by Belgian cartoonists Raoul Cauvin and Salvé (Louis Salvérius), then Lambil (Willy Lambillotte). It is a western set during the American Civil War. 13 From the French lyrics to the Communist Internationale. Interview with Baru: Part 1 219

[ce décalage] perfectly clear to the visitors, they were greeted on the exhibition square by a statue of Lenin lying flat on the ground. The exhibition proposed a little bit of working-class culture both through my stories, whose pages were on exhibit, and a whole apparatus, with films, soundtracks and related things that systematically evoked working-class culture, but especially the immigrant component of the working class. From a formal perspective, I had long thought about the question of exposing comics and am convinced that hanging up comic-book pages as though they were art works, in a museum-like manner, is at best a misunderstanding and at worst an imposture. I therefore tried not to show the comic book pages solely in a frontal position, with the page magni- fied, hung up vertically on the wall, but instead preferring to show them in a banal reading mode. You had to bend over them: there were desks. And they were systematically associated, physically, with films that recounted a recent past, and that put the pages in perspective, like a third dimension. In fact, the idea was to make an exhibition that was itself a story-portrait of immigration: ‘the arrival of the immigrants’, with film and comic-book pages, then how they lived, had fun, at the bar, the ball. And to give even more depth to this evocation you had a foosball game, a jukebox, a pinball machine, etc., all in working order, to be used by the visitors. Movement through the exhibition was rather guided: you then went on to the relationship between all that and the factory, then to the fall, the end of the factories, and the disaster that it left behind, with L’Autoroute du soleil and L’Enragé [‘The Angry Man’]. With the 350 pages of L’Autoroute du soleil that I still have I made a wall, again to avoid putting my pages in a contemplative, museum-like position. Some people didn’t like that at all. But for me it was also a way of talking about the work of a comic- book author, about the kitchen of the trade: ‘you see, all that’s work. You read that in five minutes, but have a look at what it means to make a 400-page comic book’. Fundamentally, I have the feeling that I made an exhibition that wasn’t really one. Last year, Blutch (whom I worship as one of the greatest authors of comics) chose the museum mode, but a bit askew because, after all, he’s sensi- tive and intelligent: he wasn’t going to do something show-offy, and provide his pages for the stupefied veneration of the festival commoners. So he played up the cheap side of the presentation, but it was still a very museum-like approach, with framed elements, mostly illustrations and few pages in fact. Aside from DLDDLT, I wanted to used my position to propose other things, two of which the Festival agreed on. The first was a record release, a double CD that, for me, was a kind of manifesto of my firm belief that comics and rock and roll make the same sensorial strings hum. In fact, everything that I told you earlier about comics and its relationship to speech [le verbe] I say again about rock and roll: rock and roll doesn’t appeal to the most complex part of the cerebral cortex, it’s not about words, but about urges. So I proposed this project, which was obvious to me: rock and roll intimately connected to drawing. For 220 mark mckinney

Figure 1: Baru’s cover illustration for R n’ R Antédiluvien (BD Music, ASIN 2849074411) © Baru. that I concocted a compilation of the most gut-level rock and roll there is, the kind that only tells silly stories, certainly, but where there’s an urge that makes the beat throb: American rock and roll from the late 1950s. I excluded the best- known artists – Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. Instead I went for the ones that are obscure, at least for the average person, but who have an energy, a naivety that is the quintessence of rock. Because I’m a fan, I have a lot of compilations, a lot of records of that sort. I selected thirty-one songs, and I asked thirty-one comics authors to each react to a song by creating their ideal record sleeve for it. And we made a double CD and a book of the ideal sleeve designs in a square format (twenty-five by twenty-five centimeters). It was a huge amount of work for me, something I’d never done before: contacting, convincing and then encouraging thirty-one authors. But it worked out very, very well. I was flabbergasted to see how those I had contacted Interview with Baru: Part 1 221

reacted at lightning speed. After all, we did it in a single month. They really went all out. And they did magnificent work. My own exhibition went well, but the thing I’m most proud of is that (Fig. 1). The other thing that I proposed drove home the musical point, if one believes that rock and roll is music. I took advantage of a practice that’s now become a habit at Angoulême – the drawing concert [le concert de dessins]: people who draw while a musical artist or singer performs on stage. At first I wasn’t keen on doing it, but Benoît Mouchart, the artistic director of the festival, insisted that I should: ‘Yes, yes. You’re the president, so you have to do it’. I said ‘Okay, but we’re doing a rock concert’. Up until then the musical artists who had performed were mostly focused on lyrics [chanteurs à texte], who put on shows that were relatively sedate, which provided intervals during which the cartoon- ists could draw. I knew that with rock, the cartoonist, in this case me, would have to struggle, so I asked Jean-Christophe Chauzy and a young guy whose work I admire, Benjamin Flao, to come on stage with me. We accompanied the group Heavy Trash. I worship Jon Spencer since Blues Explosion.14 It was pretty hard to get them to come to Angoulême, but in the end they did. I think that Jon and Mat are comics fans. They played their part in an extraordinary way, and we put on a stunning drawing concert. I was in heaven (Figs 2 and 3). The drawings weren’t the greatest, because rock goes too fast for you to draw it. Plus, there your work is on show, and you have to draw with thick felt-tipped pens. I can’t work with those. And since we hadn’t done any advance prepa- ration, we just jumped in and counted on our inspiration. It was risky, but in fact we enjoyed ourselves, and everyone had a blast. Mouchart was a little worried that we wouldn’t fill up the hall, because Heavy Trash isn’t well known in France. But they ended up turning people away, and we pulled the thing off in front of 700, a little taken aback at first, and then enthusiastic by the end. I have to say that Jon Spencer is a real showman. I really loved my Angoulême festival. I was able to do what I wanted to, and neither Benoît Mouchart nor Frank Bondoux got in my way. On the contrary, they followed my lead, helped me out and I’m grateful to them for that. As for the rest, the bulk of the programme, that was out of my hands, even though I would have liked to direct the Peanuts exhibition because for me it remains one of the great moments of world comics. There you have it, Angoulême’s all that. And 200,000 people came, for the book signings and the whole shebang. The last thing that I’d like to say about the role of the festival president is about the least visible part of the work behind it, but it’s the one with the largest public reper- cussion. The bulk of the work, for at least four months beginning in October, is the Secretary of Speech, the relationship to the media. I was called upon to an extent that I hadn’t dreamed of! I was expecting it. I was getting ready for it. But I didn’t think it would be that much. Having said that, I’m a good candidate for

14 Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Blues Explosion (1992). 222 mark mckinney

Figure 2: Baru drawing to the music of Jon Spencer and Heavy Trash at the drawing concert [concert de dessins] of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angou­­ lême (January 2011) © Jean-Luc Muller.

Figure 3: Baru, Jean-Christophe Chauzy and Benjamin Flao project their drawings at the concert given by Jon Spencer and Heavy Trash in Angoulême © Jean-Luc Muller. Interview with Baru: Part 1 223 them: I speak pretty easily, and I have the ambition or the pretence of reflecting on my practice. So when someone gives a microphone to me and listens to me, I have things to say about the trade and the medium, even if I sometimes get carried away with my jabbering and start saying nonsense. But in any case the 38th edition of the Angoulême festival was a good year for the press and for media commentary. The comics that I do, engage with the world as it is, and the journalists no doubt took the opportunity that was offered them to draw attention to the area of the comics field that deals with those questions. It allowed me to talk about my work, and I seized the opportunity! In the process I was able to re-present my books in forms that I had long desired, especially Villerupt 66. I had been thinking about that for a long time: put together in one volume the Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’] cycle, along with La Piscine de Micheville [‘The Micheville Pool’] and Vive la classe! I had suggested it to my publisher, Casterman, who had always sidestepped the issue. So I did it with Les Rêveurs, but still with the complicity of Casterman, because Casterman and Futuropolis, who own the rights to Quéquette blues and Vive la classe! had to give me permission to publish it there. They were top-notch: they authorised it without batting an eye, without financial compensation. Same for the two volumes of L’Enragé, finally bound together in a single volume, because I had envisioned it that way. Now everything fits together perfectly and there are no more misunderstood readings, so I’m really, really happy about that. And here and there a few republications, like La Piscine de Micheville, and my latest book especially received a lot of attention. So you see, Angoulême was a real delight for me. But now it’s over, and I’ve got to get back to work. McKinney: Did you play a role in the exhibition on Petite histoire des colonies françaises [‘Short History of the French Colonies’]?15 Baru: No, not at all. But for Mouchart and Bondoux it was probably an opportu- nity to connect that with my work in a meaningful way, by putting it right next to DLDDLT. Having said that, it’s true that Petite histoire des colonies françaises is remarkable. It’s very pertinent, and from a pedagogical standpoint it’s remarkable. In any case, when Mouchart told me, I said, ‘Yes, of course, it’s obvious.’ Because he asked me first, ‘Would you agree to have that next to your exhibit?’ But it’s really hard to make an exhibit with that work, because from a graphic perspective it’s not really spectacular. So they opted for the pedagog- ical approach, with enlargements that told stories, and text everywhere. It’s a perfect example of a ‘literary’ comic: as far as the drawing goes, there’s only the bare minimum necessary for it to be a comic. In fact it’s only words [le verbe], its only value is through words. Ultimately, if you take away the images and read the text, that’s enough. The drawings are basically pictograms.

15 Grégory Jarry (script) and Otto T. (art), Petite histoire des colonies françaises, 4 vols (Poitiers: FLBLB, 2006–2011). 224 mark mckinney McKinney: What is the place of history in your stories? You rewrite your stories to update them. Baru: I did it once, but in an especially minor way. You’re thinking of ‘Bonne année!’ [‘Happy New Year!’] and Bonne année. McKinney: Yes, for example, but not only. You’ve said that there’s the same basic story in Bonne année as in Quéquette blues: both stories involve youths who are celebrating the new year. Baru: Yes, absolutely. Bonne année and Quéquette blues are the same story, except that they’re not set in the same era. Quéquette blues was in the 1960s, which means that I was working from [m’adossais à] something that had happened, with which I was familiar, whose ins and outs were known to me, as were the causes that had produced the stories and the environment that I was narrating in Quéquette blues. And in Bonne année we’re in the twenty-first century. It’s Quéquette blues, but we were in the middle of it. So I certainly have a bit less distance there for exploring the issues. Bonne année deals with French problems of the twenty-first century, and not just French ones, I think. For me one of the elements of Quéquette blues, immigration and the integration of immigrants, was more or less a resolved issue in Quéquette blues, because in fact youths had more or less integrated each other, so integration was successful even though the social and economic context of the time wasn’t really good either. That era was described as the ‘thirty glorious years’, but they weren’t so glorious for everyone. Whereas in the 2000s, that integration doesn’t exist. So I imagined an apparatus, a metaphor to represent the fact that the integration issue hadn’t been resolved. But that’s more than history; it’s the way of the world [la marche du monde]. Let’s say that there I was rubbing up against the immediacy, the

Figure 4: We are put in the viewing position of Baru’s young male characters who stand fascinated as slag is dumped out at the metalworks. From Baru, Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005), p. 49. © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 1 225

Figure 5: Nicolas Sarkozy spouts racist, xenophobic threats on television. From Baru, Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009) p. 10 © Baru. contemporaneous-ness of the world. Whereas I believe that history refers to things that have happened and for which we hold enough keys to be able to interpret them and give them meaning. It was true for Quéquette blues, which sat atop an impending catastrophe, one with which I was familiar and that had already happened: the end of the steel industry [la sidérurgie] (Fig. 4). All of Quéquette blues was built on that perspective, and so we read it knowing that all of it collapsed. That allowed me to ask a question. In the book we already see a process unfolding, because I made it in the 1980s when the Front National (FN) was already rising, so there we can contemplate both what we left behind and where we are today.16 In fact, it was an element of comparison with what we were living then. Whereas in Bonne année I’m in the heat of things, commenting on them as they unfold. The Front National is gaining more and more ground, there’s an economic violence such that it’s destroying a lot of people. All of that means that I’m almost transcribing, which means that I don’t have any instruments: I don’t know where this is heading. Maybe I got all worked up for nothing, maybe the Front National wasn’t a big deal. I made Bonne année in 1997, which is almost fifteen years ago, and for fifteen years the Front National hasn’t

16 The Front National is a far-right French political party founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His daughter Marine Le Pen now presides over it. 226 mark mckinney dropped, and here, today, it’s starting to really cause problems for us. I did that and it remains, sadly, still up to date. The page has not been turned. Maybe later, if I’m still alive, I’ll be able to redo an episode of that, where the Front National has dissolved, and we’ll be able to do stories that lean against that period. But for the time being Bonne année doesn’t have the distance necessary to be the equivalent of Quéquette blues, even though it’s exactly the same story. McKinney: Maybe it’s a small detail, but you switched from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Nicolas Sarkozy in the different versions of Bonne année.17 Baru: But that’s again something in the context of a republication. So I took advantage of its republication ten years later, to refer to something that had happened – the election of Sarkozy – and show how he was ogling at the Front National (Fig. 5). And it’s going on now today with guys like Claude Guéant, for example, because as far as I’m concerned he’s not pretending to be far right.18 He’s fundamentally fascistic. It’s in his mental structure. He’s not pretending to be cynical, and trying to siphon off, to pick up votes from the Front National. He’s simply that way. He may be intelligent, he may be very educated, but he’s fundamentally fascistic. And, by the way, for me Sarkozy is not really the one behind it all: he’s simply a flunkey, the jack of all trades, the one who does the dirty work for people who think like him. So it’s quite natural that I replaced Le Pen with Sarkozy, and in the introduction that I wrote for Noir [‘Black’] I say why I made that change. It’s quite simply that, in ways barely more presentable: it’s exactly the same thing that’s going on. The flies have changed donkeys. McKinney: Could you speak about the change in the relationship between people of European and African immigrant heritages in your comics? When we spoke about this issue in 1996, regarding L’Autoroute du soleil, you said then that you couldn’t yet put a North African in as the bad guy. And when I read Fais péter les basses Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’], I see that things have changed. And as you also later pointed out to me, in L’Enragé things had changed. The North African doesn’t play the bad guy there, but he doesn’t take it on the chin anymore either. Baru: Yes, he’s no longer the one who causes problems. Basically, the question has to do with the status of the immigrant as a figure in my work. Historically there have been waves of immigration in France for more than 100 years, which have piled up, one after the other, and which have more or less disappeared, dissolved and therefore integrated. I’m thinking of the first ones: the Italians, Poles, etc. And then they were replaced by other immigrants, especially North Africans, then West Africans, etc., for the most disgusting jobs, as usual, the

17 Nicolas Sarkozy is the right-wing president of France who was elected in 2007. 18 For several years Claude Guéant was President Sarkozy’s head of staff. He was named Minister of the Interior (in charge of policing and enforcing immigration laws) in 2011. Interview with Baru: Part 1 227

Figure 6: Lharbi Amran, a young Frenchman of North African heritage, tells his friends how a racist white girl rejected his advances at a year-end party. From Baru, Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005), p. 35 © Baru. least qualified ones. So in Quéquette blues we are at a point in time where the Italians, the Poles and so on no longer constitute a problem. That means that they no longer exist as figures of the other, the foreigner, but as people who have become French. I already associate them with North African immigrant characters – not yet in a sufficiently obvious manner – to suggest that this part of the group of friends in Quéquette blues doesn’t present a problem. Except that they do, because even though people are no longer treating Italians and Poles in a crappy way for being foreigners, the North Africans are being stigmatised as foreigners in Quéquette blues (Fig. 6). All that interests me is how the stubborn ones are dissolved, which is to say how one successfully integrates. At the time when I was making Quéquette blues, North African immigration was already problematic in France. It was clear that they were having trouble dissolving, disappearing. I focus there on Italian immigration, but I knew that in any case I would end up at contem- porary Maghrebi immigration, which has expanded and become the majority 228 mark mckinney stream in France, beginning more or less in the 1960s, up to now, because it’s ongoing. I put them in my work, and when I raise the issue of their integration, I give them roles: they’re going to be fictional characters and carry meaning. For a long, long time I put the figure of the immigrant into what it bore most symptomatically for me, in as much as it received the worst of the social and economic violence in our country. Therefore I always put immigrants in the roles of victim and in an environment that was unfavourable to them. I did it knowing perfectly well that all is not sombre in the integration of North Africans: there are some who have succeeded perfectly in integrating. But the problem is that many of them have not been able to, quite simply because the most banal and powerful vector for integration is through work, which allows you to exist socially, because you have a part to play in society. From the moment when there’s no more work – and they were first to lose their jobs – the machine stalls. So I believed it was my duty not to stigmatise North and West Africans by making them play roles in my fiction that they nonetheless played in the real world, insofar as they are completely marginalised in French society and there- fore produce the most asociality and problems within society. It’s natural that they contribute greatly to the criminal underworld [la pègre], marginal violence and drug-trafficking. It’s logical, as it was for Italians who were in the criminal underworld in the 1930s. That was the real world, but I didn’t want to do that, for the simple reason that my job isn’t to do ethno-sociological reportage but to create fictions that help us understand the cause of that marginalisation. So I deliberately chose never to give them that role. But later I wondered whether it wasn’t a form of naivety on my part and a way of maintaining the illusion that if you’re a victim you can only be someone nice and good, and that a victim is

Figure 7: Dr Faurissier (centre foreground) listens to the fictional double of Jean-Marie Le Pen give a political speech at a meeting of a fascist party. From Baru, L’Autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1995), p. 23 © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 1 229 necessarily virtuous. And it seemed to me that it was a flaw [une fausseté] in my work. My victims aren’t tearful: they don’t give in. Karim in L’Autoroute du soleil is a victim who’s confronted with the huge violence that’s done to him. The Front National figure therefore plays the bad guy (Fig. 7). But there too it was a bit idealised, even though Karim, from a social stand- point, wasn’t very clean. He wasn’t really a nice guy, but he was still a victim. In the last book, Fais péter les basses Bruno!, I told myself that maybe it was the right time to give the immigrant figure a role that exists for immigrants in today’s society, where they supply the largest group in the criminal under- world. I decided to do it in that book in part because its form allowed that: at base it’s a joke, something that’s a bit unbelievable. So, indeed, I did create a North African character who’s ultra-violent, crazy, but it’s because he fit the story. I don’t think, for example, that … But yes, I think that I now have to take that into account, and that there’s no going back. But maybe I was able to do it too because beforehand I had created the North African character in L’Enragé – Mo, Mohammed – whom I liked a lot (Fig. 8). For me he gave the lie to

Figure 8: Mohamed Meddadi, a sports journalist, represents people of North African heritage who have successfully integrated into French society. From Baru, L’Enragé: édition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2010), p. 120 © Baru. 230 mark mckinney the argument that North Africans weren’t integrating because they couldn’t be assimilated, because they have an ethnic culture that’s different from ours. Not at all. From the moment that Mo, who’s not stupid, had studied at a university, he became an ordinary individual, a normal guy. Plus he was a journalist, and God knows that today in the media there is an enormous number of journalists of immigrant background. For me it was a way of saying: ‘Look, there are not only scum [des racailles] among the immigrants’.19 So from one book to the next I’ve managed to created a portrait of immigra- tion that I find, for the moment, relatively true to life. But above all I never evacuate the conditions that produce immigrants and their offspring, especially in works such as L’Enragé. In Fais péter les basses Bruno! things were a bit different: I wasn’t going to focus on that because it’s not the theme of the book. In fact, Fais péter les basses Bruno! is somewhat atypical for my work. It’s an hommage to the right-wing anarchist cinema of Lautner and Audiard – they’re anarchists, but what I call right-wing anarchists. To distinguish my work from that perspective, I included another figure from contemporary immigration: the undocumented alien [le sans papiers]. This figure is relatively new in the French context, in any case insofar as it is stigmatised. This one presented itself in a completely natural way, and I knew I needed it. I don’t think I could have done this story without the character, because otherwise I would have made a truly genre-based story, which I would have found much less interesting. It’s true that it’s still genre-based and rather light-weight, as stories go, but I hope that the figure of the young, African, illegal alien unsettles the reader a bit. The character’s caught between a rock and a hard place (Fig. 9). The reference here is to the movie Les Tontons flingueurs [‘Crooks in Clover’ or ‘Monsieur Gangster’], which when released was considered to be a B picture bomb [un nanard], one so bad that it was funny.20 Today there’s a kind of consensus about it – it’s become a cult movie. It has trans-generational and especially trans-class popularity: from Neuilly to the nethermost regions of the countryside, it’s regarded as a good movie. There’s a French consensus about who the bad guys are: they’re really recognisable characters [vraiment bien typés]. So what’s interesting is to take that and show others who are now caught in the middle and are crushed by the system. My book was a way of showing that.

19 This word has a specific resonance in contemporary French history. On 25 October 2005, Sarkozy, who was then Minister of the Interior, was filmed telling a French citizen that he (i.e., the police) was going to clean out the ‘gang of scum’ [bande de racaille] at a housing project in Argenteuil, a suburb of Paris. This was two days before riots broke out following the death by electrocution of two youths who were being pursued by police officers and had hidden in a high-voltage electric station (a third youth was severely wounded, but survived). Sarkozy’s expression angered many, including at least one high official within the government administration. Sarkozy also falsely claimed that ‘the police were not physically pursuing’ the victims when they died. 20 Georges Lautner, Les Tontons flingueurs (1963). Interview with Baru: Part 1 231

Figure 9: Slimane, an African immigrant who has just arrived illegally in France by hiding in the cargo hold of an aircraft, barely succeeds in evading a customs police officer who tries to catch him at the airport. From Baru, Fais péter les basses Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 2010) p. 17 © Baru.

McKinney: He’s the one who makes out like a bandit at the end, he’s got the money. Baru: Exactly, because he’s the smartest. My position there isn’t moral, or in any case it’s not moralising, but my thesis is that those who are showing up here are the smart ones. The big mistake that people make – and it’s often made when people discuss these issues with me – is that a lot of folks who’ve been in France for a long time, for generations, think that ‘other countries send us their garbage, their leftovers’. It’s exactly the opposite! They’re completely wrong! Those who come to us, even like that, are the cream of the crop, the most intelligent, the most dynamic, those who really want to get ahead. Immigrants have an energy that’s collosal. I know so: it was my father’s. And I know that it’s the best among them who leave home. So when they arrive here we get the smartest, and not what this abominable theory about ‘chosen immigration’ [l’immigration choisie] holds to be true.21 For heaven’s sake, if we picked and chose, the same ones would still come because they’re the best. That’s why my character is like that: the kid’s no idiot by any means. First of all he’s talented – he plays soccer really well – but he’s not stupid either, and he knows an oppor- tunity when he sees one. He grabs it, and he’s right. McKinney: And we don’t realise before the end that he’s taken the money.

21 In late 2005, the Ministry of the Interior, headed by Sarkozy, was preparing a law to promote ‘chosen immigration’ and reduce illegal ‘imposed immigration’ [l’immigration subie]: more highly qualified immigrants (students, professionals, etc.) and fewer unskilled workers. This led to a much more restrictive immigration law (passed in June 2006, it went into effect on 24 July 2006). Sarkozy also used these catchphrases in his successful presidential campaign. 232 mark mckinney Baru: Of course. That’s the art of storytelling. McKinney: There’s something else in that comic book that returns: the Algerian War. We see it in a lot of your stories: Vive la classe!, Le Chemin de l’Amérique, Les Années Spoutnik. Baru: And in the last one too. Certainly, we’ve already talked about it, but you know how much that event had a profound effect on me personally. No doubt if I bring it up regularly it’s because it’s also one of the keys for understanding the situation of North African immigrants today in France: those people threw us out! They kicked our butts! And it’s likely that the type of treatment that’s meted out to them is partly due to the Algerian War. I believe that even today the Algerian War is still one of the component parts of the French mentality, even if already half of the French population never lived through it. There’s still the family tradition: when the father or the grandfather fought in the Algerian War, his son or grandson has heard about it, maybe not through stories, but in any case the relation that the father or grandfather has with the Algerian population has certainly been passed on, along with table manners, one’s relationship to work, or how to tend one’s garden. So I probably bring it out again regularly quite simply because the relationship to the Algerian War is one of the component parts of French culture. And in my latest book I use it once again, this time in a burlesque fashion, but down deep it means that the war has left its mark on generations. So this old gangster who went through the Algerian War is confronted with a North African. I play on the permanence of that element. After all, the Germans have a problem with the Nazis. But you know I come from a cultural sphere where a Kraut [un Boche] is always a Kraut, whatever happens. I had trouble getting rid of that. I’m not even sure whether I’ve succeeded, but I give today’s Germans great credit for really having done an enormous job on working out their relationship to their past, their history. I don’t think they’re close to bringing back fascism again, even if among them there are from time to time a few imbeciles who stoke their nostalgia for that period. But the bulk of the Germans have really settled that question. I think that we haven’t done that with the Algerian War. But hey, it’s true too that there were a million repatriated French [rapatriés] who had children and who spread out and mixed with others, and also, once again, that remains one of the basic components of French culture. That’s why the issue is always there: I use it like worry beads [un poil à gratter]. When it comes down to it, it’s the Algerian War that’s going to bring the plot to a head: the story can resolve itself because there’s this veterans’ get-together. The artificer learned how to handle plastic explosives during the Algerian War: he was responsible for the fireworks, as he calls them, in the unit that set off bombs. And maybe he also went to de-mine minefields, so he knows how to do that, he learned it there. I think this character is very interesting because he saw what went on there, and because of that he doesn’t talk about it. So in fact by stealing its money he has Interview with Baru: Part 1 233

Figure 10: A French veteran of the Algerian War suddenly goes berserk when he sees two armed French gangsters of North African heritage and has a flashback to the Algerian War. He identifies them as Algerian nationalist combattants and subsequently begins shooting at them. From Baru, Fais péter les basses Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 2010) p. 110 © Baru.

more or less turned his back on the society that made him go to war, the things that he learned there. McKinney: He’s a member of the group of veterans, but we don’t see him shooting at the North Africans. Baru: Let’s say that he doesn’t get involved: he’s not going to pick up a gun and start shooting at the others. He just surveys the damage. Today a crook is an asocial being, he’s not integrated. But this guy is: he with all his army buddies. And God knows that among them there are some complete idiots. They’re all drunks and sickos; guys who are still seeing Algerian gooks [des fellaghas] everywhere.22 And he hasn’t put that all behind him; he’s going to keep that up. So that’s the whole ambiguity of the draftees during the Algerian War. There’s a really good book about that, about the speech of draftees during the Algerian War, Appelés en Algérie, which expresses well what the Algerian War was for the French.23 Because generally when people talk about the Algerian War, they’re talking about Pieds-noirs, who were repatriated [les rapatriés], or about the million Algerians who died.24 But it’s important to see the damage it did to the French soldiers (Fig. 10). And what you should know about those three there is that they’re three of my friends. And especially one, whose name I deliberately kept in, Gaby, who was based in Batna, not quite in the same regiment, because

22 ‘Fellagha’ means ‘highway robber’, but it was used by the French to designate their Algerian nationalist foes during the Algerian War. 23 Claire Mauss-Copeaux, Les Appelés en Algérie: la parole confisquée [‘The Draftees in Algeria: Confis- cated Speech’] (Paris: Hachette, 1998). 24 Pieds-noirs (literally ‘black feet’) and ‘rapatriés’ are synonyms here for the French colonial popula- tion in Algeria that left the country when it gained independence in 1962. 234 mark mckinney that wasn’t important. He talks about it a little more often now, but only to say that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He says: ‘No, no, I prefer not to discuss it. We acted like bastards [des salauds]’. He’s a sculptor. He’s a really sensitive guy, a great person. A beautiful guy, but there you have it. So this thing’s also a tribute to Gaby. It’s funny, because he’s pretty proud of it. He’s come to events with me two or three times, and people recognise him, because he looks rather like my character. McKinney: There’s something else that comes back in your work, which is the relationship to the left. I’m thinking of Cours camarade! [‘Run Comrade!’], first, and, L’Autoroute du soleil, with the character from the commune, la Fleur [‘Flower’], and then Les Années Spoutnik (Fig. 11). Baru: For that last one it’s obvious: it’s more or less the subject. I don’t make proselytising works. It’s just that I believe that the culture of the left, the polit- ical left in any case, the working-class left, the unions’ left, profoundly struc- tured the working class. And it’s the collapse of that culture that contributed to the state of the working class today, which is to say its non-existence. Today the working class doesn’t even recognise itself as a class anymore. I regret that we lost that resource, because it would have been a perfectly pertinent instrument today for opposing the way of the world [la marche du monde] just a little bit. And so what runs through my work is the regret for that left, for the disappear- ance of those resources: class solidarity, and, consequently, the social force that it represented, to possibly weigh on the evolution and the political choices that are made in a country. Today the right – as that imbecile said – is completely uninhibited [totalement décomplexée], and for good reason: there’s no one on the other side. I don’t think it’s definitive. All that’s cyclical. It will probably come back. But the left, that left in any case, was intimately linked to the exist-

Figure 11: School children, teachers and other members of a metalworking, working- class community sing the Communist Internationale as they follow the car of a local party official that is carrying a model of Sputnik and broadcasting the telegraphic sounds emitted by the satellite. From Baru, Les Années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’], vol. 3: Bip bip! [‘Beep Beep!’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2002) p. 21 © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 1 235 ence of work, but of productive, creative work, not the work of employees, the work of lackies, servants. The real response of capitalism to revolutionary potential, to the power of the left’s counter-project was to eliminate work and to take it elsewhere, and so to replace it with servants’ work. And so we’re in the middle of that today. When the government talks about work it’s only about jobs in the services, in the tertiary sector or idiocies like that. In my opinion, the working class, I mean the people, will again become an essential part of the social and political life of a country only to the extent that the people will be able to master the making of the wealth of a country. So today a strike doesn’t mean anything any longer, because it doesn’t bother anyone. A boss doesn’t lose money anymore with a strike, insofar as a servant doesn’t go on strike. And I admit that for me, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first means the bitter recognition of that deliquescence. I don’t know whether it will come back – I may die before then – but in any case we’re apparently going down that path, alas. McKinney: A part of Les Années Spoutnik seems to be a critique of the stupidity of those who directed the Party. I’m thinking of the Communist father, whom you depict as a little stupid. Baru: For me the Communisty Party, and Communists in general, were very powerful because they gave a lot of resources to the workers. But it simply became an apparatus. More or less, all the Communist parties became Soviet- ised. What I’m doing in Les Années Spoutnik is to provide a critical reading of that Sovietisation, of that Stalinisation. The militant in the book is a Stalinist – but in the worst sense, that is he was caught up in his discourse, and in the end simply wasn’t even able to see that he was squelching his own ideals. That’s indeed a critical approach on my part towards the movement, generally speaking. Behind all that I’m giving, on the side of the people, the viewpoint that I had then as a child. I put my hope in that: I really believed in a bright future [aux lendemains qui allaient chanter], in glowing horizons, and this was more or less my disenchantment. That character incarnates my disenchant- ment. I know that it was the apparatus, the Soviets, that killed Communism, the Communist Utopia. What mainly caused the collapse of the working class was the disappearance of work, but there was also the instrument that had been put to work. It did great things – it allowed us to work less, live better, be better cared for, have better housing conditions. A lot of very, very important things like that. I lived through all that. And there it was those very resources that were going to bury that. Basically, Les Années Spoutnik is quite simply a metaphor for all that. Sputnik is not so much the conquest of space as the Cold War: Sputnik is more a product of the Cold War than of humanity’s desire to go off into space. It’s the end of the steel industry and the end of the colonies. And, funda- mentally, it’s the collapse of these three pylons, of these three pillars of Western civilisation in the twentieth century. The pillar that concerned me the most is 236 mark mckinney therefore that of the political left, the active left, the trade-union left, whose core was already rotting, with its military obsession. And what I say in Les Années Spoutnik is that the Americans won the war against the Soviet Union quite simply because they forced them to arm themselves in a completely paranoid way, to the point of ruining their own economy. If there had not been the Cold War, I’m not certain that the USSR would be in the state it’s in today. In fact I’m convinced that it wouldn’t be. So the Americans won the war. They came to fight Hitler as a sideline, but the primary reason that they came was to stop the Russians. It cost them a lot: many Americans died in Europe. To do a bit of anti-American provocation, I’d say that the United States didn’t beat the Germans, the Russians did. It cost them a lot: twenty million dead, as much as from Stalinism. I believe that if Americans intervened in Europe in an official manner, it’s not for principles, but simply because if they had let the Russians get their way, today France might be a former socialist republic, in the best-case scenario.

Bibliography of Baru’s Comic Books La Piscine de Micheville [‘The Micheville Pool’] (Paris: Dargaud, 1985). La Communion du Mino [‘Mino’s Communion’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 1985). Vive la classe! [‘Long Live the Draftees!’], colours Daniel Ledran (Paris: Futuropolis, 1987). Cours camarade! [‘Run Comrade!’], colours Daniel Ledran (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988). Le Chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’], with Jean-Marc Thévenet (script) and Daniel Ledran (colours) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990). L’Autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1995). Sur la route encore [‘On the Road Again’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1997). Bonne Année [‘Happy New Year’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1998). Le Chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’] (Tournai: Casterman, 1998). Les Années Spoutnik, vol. 1, Le Penalty [‘The Sputnik Years, vol. 1, The Penalty’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 1999). Les Années Spoutnik, vol. 2, C’est moi le chef! [‘The Sputnik Years, vol. 2, I’m the Chief/ Boss!’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2000). Les Années Spoutnik, vol. 3, Bip bip! [‘The Sputnik Years, vol. 3, Beep Beep!’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2002). Road to America, trans. Helge Dascher (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2002). Les Années Spoutnik, vol. 4, Boncornards têtes-de-lard! [‘The Sputnik Years, vol. 4, Stubborn-Headed Cuckolds!’], colours Daniel Ledran and Baru (Tournai: Caster­ ­man, 2003). L’Enragé, vol. 1 [‘The Angry Man, vol. 1’], colours Baru and Daniel Ledran (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2004). Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005) [first edn 1984–1986]. L’Enragé, vol. 2 [‘The Angry Man, vol. 2’], colours Baru and Daniel Ledran (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2006). Interview with Baru: Part 1 237

L’Autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2008). Les Années Spoutnik: Édition intégrale [‘The Sputnik Years: Complete Edition’], colours Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2009). Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009). L’Enragé: Édition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2010). Fais péter les basses Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 2010). Villerupt 1966: Quéquette Blues, La Piscine de Micheville, Vive la classe! [‘Villerupt 1966: Weenie Blues, The Micheville Pool, Long Live the Draftees!’] (Montreuil: Les Rêveurs, 2010). Interview with Baru: Part 2

Mark McKinney

Abstract This is the second portion of an interview with Hervé Barulea, or Baru, one of the most accomplished French cartoonists living today, conducted at his home in France on Y5 July 20YY. The fi rst part of the interview was published in European Comic Art 4.Y (fall 20YY), 2Y3–237. Baru talks here about a broad range of important topics, including autobiography, the roles of work and leisure in his comics, boxing (his focus in two comics), the society of the spectacle, representations of women and minorities in comics, the heritage of classic French and Belgian comics (series such as Tintin, Yves-le-Loup [‘Ivan- the-Wolf’] and Spirou) and the clear-line drawing style, experimentation by Oubapo, space, his drawing style and techniques for making comics, his current and future projects, his former teaching position in the Ecole des beaux-arts in Nancy, and the relationship of comics to fi ne art. Keywords: Autobiography, Baru, Heritage, Interview, Leisure, Minorities, Spectacle, Women, Working Class McKinney: Could you speak about your relationship to autobiography in comics? I’m wondering whether it’s evolving. You’ve said that Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’] was misunderstood as pure autobiography, whereas in fact it wasn’t that. But you’ve also mentioned doing a comic book about Italian immigrants that might be more autobiographical. Baru: Yes, in my project titled Bella ciao, that issue won’t concern me, because I’m going to invent a lot of situations that have probably existed but that didn’t happen to me, so it’s a matter of inventing them without making them up. In other words, it won’t be a case of me, Hervé Barulea, telling my life story. It will be a realist fi ction that will paint a picture of an almost ideal family of Italian immigrants. Within that family I’ll concentrate all the events that have left their mark on the history of Italian immigration, so basically the history of the twentieth century.

European Comic Art Volume 5 Number 2, Winter 20ı2: 67–9Y doi:ı0.3Y67/eca.20ı2.050205 ISSN ı754–3797 (Print), ISSN ı754–3800 (Online) 68 MARK MCKINNEY

Because they were in a weak social position, they were necessarily in the vanguard of vast changes. They were the fi rst victims, but also the fi rst actors. So it won’t be autobiographical. Here’s my relationship to autobiography: it’s true that when I began Quéquette blues there was a misunderstanding, because readers thought that I was telling my life story. And it’s true that the entire form of Quéquette blues is autobiographical, since I say ‘Me, I,’ etcetera. And all the more so, because I put the working class front and center, and I’m of that class, or at least I’m from it. All that could indeed suggest that I was telling my life story, but the simple fact is that Quéquette blues is a story, with events that are articulated through causal relationships, with plot twists, and it’s almost too good to be true. There are bits of truth in it, by which I mean things that I know well, because I’m speaking about myself but also about my own. In fact I’m mostly talking about them. So automatically, the character who says ‘me, I’ is a construction, just as the whole group of protagonists in that story is a construction based on my group of buddies and myself. I reorganized all that in order to make it meaningful. What’s certain is that if you look at the daily ramblings of my group of young toughs, they’re meaningless. But temporal distance allowed me to draw from that enough lessons to produce a story that in the end creates a reality effect that is a lot closer to the social truth of my cultural group than to simple, factual reality. In other words, I don’t need to relate things that happened to me. So that’s my relationship to autobiography. It’s true that I speak about myself in those stories, but I don’t only speak about me. In fact, for me Quéquette blues and even Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] forever remain a group portrait, just as Bella Ciao, if I manage to get it off the ground and complete it, will be a group portrait. Roughly speaking, that’s what really interests me. An autobiography is pertinent – by which I mean it deserves to be published – insofar as what happens to the character who says ‘I’ is suffi ciently universal to interest everyone else. If, on the other hand, it’s about viewing the narcissistic display of an individual whose sole characteristic is the rareness and excellence of his feelings, or else the abjection of his behavior, I really couldn’t care less. That guy doesn’t interest me. If there’s not a bit of humanity in him, there’s no point in publishing anything about him. I’m ready to listen empathetically to the diffi culties and the joys of this or that person, but I fi nd that insignifi cant in the literal sense: it’s meaningless. When something is meaningful, one can draw lessons from it that can be applied generally. I believe that pure autobiography is insignifi cant for Interview with Baru: Part 2 69 that reason, except if the person who puts himself on stage aims for the universal. There are a few of them out there, for example, Fabrice Neaud: when he talks about himself, he’s also speaking about what it means to be homosexual today. Today that speaks to enough people for it to be pertinent to publish something like it. When David B. talks about himself and his relationship to his brother’s illness, it’s a Greek tragedy: we’re at the groundings of humanist culture. There, okay, I applaud wholeheartedly. When someone speaks about how he can’t manage to get up in the morning, I couldn’t care less. It’s completely uninteresting. I believe that there’s no such thing as pure autobiography: all autobiographers are liars. They’re writing something, so automatically they disguise reality, their truth. And even when they’re talking about themselves, when they’re strictly narcissistic, it’s only to give themselves the lead role, even when they heap garbage on their heads: it’s ‘don’t you see, I’m an abject being.’ There, once again, it’s a composition. But it’s completely uninteresting: not everyone who wants to can be Georges Bataille. McKinney: There are a lot of leisure activities in your books, and not a lot of work, except for boxing, but there too we have another type of leisure activity, not for the boxer but for the spectator. Baru: I wouldn’t have made the connection to L’enragé [‘The Raging Man’], between the world of boxing and the world of work, and therefore paradoxically the world of leisure activities. The conditions of existence of leisure activities are determined by the conditions of production of added value. In a nutshell, for me leisure is always linked to the way one works. What I stage are the leisure activities of the children of the working class, or of the working class itself, or else the leisure activities of the kids who live in the projects, which is to say the absence of leisure activities insofar as there’s no more work there. And in L’enragé boxing isn’t a trade – moreover, the boxer’s father says as much. Yet the boxer can’t do anything else, and in spite of it all, it ends up being a way for him to take charge of his social status: he will be a boxer. His father wants nothing to do with that (Fig. Y). He will suffer enormously for it, but it will be a way of taking charge of his social status. So boxing doesn’t have the status of leisure in L’enragé; it’s simply the metaphor for what a person who doesn’t have the tools to be able to fi nd work when it is gone is obliged to do. It’s one of the ways out, the metaphor for the price to be paid, to be able to try, despite it all, to become integrated into a society, whereas all the 70 MARK MCKINNEY

Figure 1: Boxing as a way for Anton Witkowsky to take charge of his social status: here we see a stand-off between him and his parents in the kitchen, when he tells them he wants to quit his studies and box. His parents would rather he succeed in school and then fi nd a regular job. From Baru, L’enragé: Edition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 20Y0), 7, panel 5. © Baru. determinisms that confi ned him to that space tend to distance him from society. It will be the worst way of succeeding in achieving social integration. So for me, boxing in L’enragé and in Le chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’] plays the same role, which is to basically say it’s the way for someone who doesn’t have much available for trying to carve out his niche, and who pays the price for it. Paradoxically, it’s almost the only moment where I speak about work, where I show work, if one considers it to be a form of work, whereas the rest of the time one never gets inside the factories. Even in Les années Spoutnik, the factory is there in the conclusion, but we stay outside. There’s a strike. McKinney: Yes, precisely, we go past the gates, but never inside the building. Baru: So there I don’t know. Why I never talk about work is certainly a question that I’ve been asked before. Maybe it’s out of modesty, quite simply because I never set foot there, in the workplace, in the factory, so I wouldn’t know how to speak about it in a meaningful way. What interests me more is what work has produced, that is, the consequences of the factory’s existence (Fig. 2). That’s why for me the factory is the mother of all the life around it and why I fi nd it interesting. It’s almost a tutelary fi gure, like the commander in Don Giovanni: he’s there, and the factory is too, apparently for eternity, for all time, even though we know that no, it’s not true. So I want to see what it has produced, in terms of life. That’s my thesis: the life that the factory generates, there, is worth yours, even if you’re from Neuilly. So my characters deserve to be heroes of fi ction as much as you do. That’s my thesis: I started making comics for that. Interview with Baru: Part 2 7ı

Figure 2: The iron-and-steel factory as a tutelary fi gure: its presence is felt throughout the story and determines the living conditions of those around it. Here, at the end, we see it from the outside, towering over the landscape of northeastern France. From Baru, Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005), Y42. © Baru. 72 MARK MCKINNEY

McKinney: Just to clarify: have you literally never set foot in the factory? Baru: Sure, sure, I’ve set foot in the factory! I went there regularly to bring my father’s food to him. I’ve been in the factory, of course, but not to work. And my whole life has been about escaping from the factory, with the price that I’ve had to pay, that of having betrayed. I’m pretty certain today that everything I do is designed to blot out that sense of guilt, of having betrayed. And every time I say that, I’m told ‘Oh, no! That’s not true! You shouldn’t view it like that!’ But yes, that’s what it is. In fact that’s how I’m paying: I’m giving back what was given to me. For me, that’s probably the most important experience of my life, to be a worker’s son, and to be here today, sitting here in this way. So for me the factory has certainly always been a literal object of fascination, which draws me toward it and repels me. I believe that’s been my life, and that it still is today. McKinney: Is drawing also a little bit like boxing? Is boxing also a metaphor, or can it serve as a metaphor, for your way of drawing? Is it a form of struggle? Baru: In any case it’s very energetic: there’s violence in boxing (Fig. 3). And I have a relationship to drawing that’s pretty violent. I’m not a peaceful, serene artist. I think that there’s probably something unconscious about such choices. I go in that direction because I’m

Figure 3: The violence of boxing: Anton, of working-class, immigrant background, deftly strikes down his adversary during his fi rst paid fi ght in the ring. From Baru, L’enragé: Edition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 20Y0), Y6, panel 6. © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 2 73

naturally drawn to that sort of thing. I was talking about drawing with Christian Lax (Lacroix), who’s chosen cycling, which was a possible metaphor for me, because there’s violence in cycling, and it usually always involves people of few means. No great champions have come out of Neuilly.1 Historically that was true: the greatest cyclists were from the North, former miners and farmers. So I had that option too, but maybe I was always reluctant to take it because, fi rst of all, you have to draw bicycles, which isn’t easy to do with my drawing style, but also because I think that the violence of cycling isn’t obvious enough, it’s not suffi ciently expressive. But Christian, on the other hand, pulled it off very, very well, with Pain d’alouette [‘Miner’s Bread Scraps’], which is a truly amazing work. Plus he made a graphic leap that I fi nd remarkable. I, on the other hand, gravitated toward boxing, even though I’ve never boxed, whereas I’ve cycled. I’ve played a lot of soccer too, which is obvious after all, but soccer was never enough for me, except in the violent way that I used it in Fais péter les basses, Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’], which is to say in the possibility of doing it. The violence comes from the impossibility of the young man to benefi t from his ability, to parley it into fi nancial gain. We could keep extending the metaphor with drawing: a moment ago you mentioned boxing as a substitute for work, and we could indeed consider this guy to be going to work when he goes to box, and I go to work when I begin drawing. We’re in the same register when we spin the metaphor that way. Perhaps it’s true that I focus on boxing because for me it’s a manner of grappling with my drawing. I have that relationship to drawing: it’s not always a pleasure for me. When I’ve fi nished my day’s work, and sometimes I have to stop early, I’m exhausted. I’m full of tension, and it hurts my back. McKinney: What’s the place of comics in the society of the spectacle and vice versa? I’m thinking of Anton in L’enragé. Baru: If we stick to the structural aspect, the display of boxing is frontal, that is to say, that we reduce the space to a panel: a boxing ring is a comics panel. So we’re sort of in a frontal relationship to the image. But beyond that I don’t see any other links between comics and boxing, or in any case, to the display of boxing. McKinney: But we see television, the society of the spectacle, in your comics: the spectacle of politics on the television that is thrown out of the window, and rock and roll is part of that spectacle too (Fig. 4).

ı A wealthy suburb of Paris. All notes are by the translator, Mark McKinney. 74 MARK MCKINNEY

Figure 4: The spectacle of the mass media: Kent, a young man who despite his name is no doubt of North African heritage, throws his television out of the window because he is fed up with hearing Nicolas Sarkozy spout hate-fi lled rhetoric about those living in housing projects, including himself. From Baru, Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009), Y2. © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 2 75

Baru: No, I think that rock and roll in the way that I rework it is a personal practice: it’s more about personal jubilation than about a spectacle. I believe that rock and roll and salon dancing, not stage dancing, are simply forms of conviviality. Of course when you dance you show yourself off, but in the midst of other dancers, and I think that has more to do with the cohesion of the group that’s there. What characterizes rock and roll as a form of dance is a type of social bonding, of a cultural connection for the group that’s there dancing with its band. Beyond that, the staging of rock and roll, and therefore of the group, of the music, is certainly on a stage. So it’s a staging, and comics are fi rst of all a staging. I don’t really see how one could push that further, because belonging to the society of the spectacle in the Debordian meaning of the term … On the other hand, in the situations that I put into play, I ask questions about the society of the spectacle, that is, the uses to which images can be put in social communication. But it’s a material on which I write and work, and I don’t have the feeling that by making comics I contribute to the society of the spectacle. In that case we would quickly end up generalizing the thing, which kills the pertinence of the positioning. If comics participate in the society of the spectacle, then literature does so just as much, and so does cinema. However, I fi nd that there are still also elements that can serve as tools for understanding the society of the spectacle, and I dare to hope that some comics contribute to that just as much as do literature or cinema, or scientifi c works by university researchers and by scholars. McKinney: So one could say that L’enragé does that too by its display of Rolling Stone and all types of mediatization (Fig. 5). Baru: Exactly. My subject is society in its functioning. But my metaphor of the boxing world points toward the functioning of society, including in the use of images and media communication. That’s why I use newspaper clippings, televised images, and even the relationship to the televised image, through the use of a video cassette recorder and things like it. However, it’s simply because these are constitutive elements of the society in which we live, as well as very, very powerful things that help impose a social norm. In other words, the media are there for the normative violence that they exert on the members of society, on subjects. McKinney: One fi nds that too in Bonne année [‘Happy New Year’]: the fi lm that the characters are watching. In the conclusion there is a 76 MARK MCKINNEY

Figure 5: Comics as a tool for understanding the society of the spectacle: a pastiche of a Rolling Stone cover suggests the corrosive effects of money on Anton Witkowsky, now a successful French boxer on the international scene. From Baru, L’enragé: Edition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 20Y0), 62. © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 2 77

Figure 6: A comic book shows how cinema can serve as a tool of emancipation: in a dystopian France of the future, a policeman, after watching a movie about resisting the racist and classist division of society, goes off to free his prisoners even though he has no authorization to do so. He will return them to their walled-off housing project instead of taking them to prison. From Baru, Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009), Y0Y, panels 6–7. © Baru.

reading of the fi lm that leads to the liberation of two characters from the housing projects. Baru: Yes, exactly. That tool, the fi lmic medium, which is there at the beginning of the story, is at fi rst considered to be a tool of domination by those who feel the brunt of it, whereas at the end – because I think that cinema must be that too – it’s a tool of emancipation. And that’s how the guy, the cop, who’s watching the same movie at the end of the story, asks himself, ‘hey, what are we doing?’ (Fig. 6). McKinney: So it’s a sort of refl exive device. Baru: Yes, that’s right. McKinney: You’ve talked a lot about immigration and workers,2 but you speak also to other forms of marginalization, specifi cally of women and homosexuals, who appear with respect to domination in your work. Baru: You mean as fi gures of victimization? McKinney: Yes. Baru: Well, with respect to homosexuals it’s obvious, even if I don’t spend a lot of time on that. In Bonne année I felt that I’d nailed things, right where and in the way it was needed, without posturing (Fig. 7).

2 See the fi rst part of this interview. 78 MARK MCKINNEY

Figure 7: Representing homophobia in comics: on New Year’s Eve, two young friends see the body of a gay man whom authorities of a dystopian France of the future forced into their housing project. The man was then ruthlessly hunted down and killed by some of its inhabitants. From Baru, Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009), 82, panel 6. © Baru.

So it’s obvious that I’m preaching for the normalization of that situation. It’s not easy to deal with that issue. I prefer that someone such as Neaud do his job, because he’s better situated than I am to do it. It’s the same thing for women: I don’t see myself speaking for women, because I’m convinced that I wouldn’t know how to. I’m waiting for there to be more women making comics, to have a specifi cally feminine point of view if such a thing exists, because I have doubts about that. I think that she’s probably going to express the same viewpoints as all the dominated, all the same reactions to the things imposed on us, like any human being. Since in comics we’re still in an environment that’s not misogynist, but in which men unfortunately still constitute the great majority of participants, we’re lacking women’s viewpoints. I’m waiting for there to be more women in order to ask the question, and maybe receive an answer, as to whether there is a specifi cally feminine point of view. Because each time I see a man trying to speak in the place of women, I see stereotypes more than anything. I’m not even talking about Milo Manara, who’s a caricature. Interview with Baru: Part 2 79

Jean-Claude Denis tries his hand at it and has a certain talent for it. What I like in his work is that he has interesting feminine characters, but doesn’t speak for them: they’re there, he has the deepest respect for them, he knows how to move around them and he stages them. He’s a very delicate guy. Same thing for Jean-Pierre Gibrat, even if he acknowledges that he has a slight tendency to reproduce stereotypes about girls: his are almost always knockouts, rarely average. But he has interesting feminine characters. I know I wouldn’t be capable of doing that, so I have a tendency to stage feminine characters within the environment that I describe, which ties my hands a bit: women are not equal partners still today in the company of toughs and gangsters. Although in my last book, Fais péter les basses, Bruno!, the old man’s wife isn’t a weak character. She’s not a doormat. When the house has burned down he tells himself that the hardest part will be to explain things to her, which means she’s someone with character. Véronique, in distress in L’autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’], was one of the interesting characters that I was able to create (Fig. 8). I think that I succeeded in putting her into play in opposition to her mother, who’s a caricature of a woman embittered by and disappointed in life and everything that surrounds her. Edith is another of my feminine characters, in Sur la route encore [‘On the Road Again’]. In that case I tried to speak for her and found it a bit diffi cult. People often say, ‘But you’re a misogynist!’ When I ask why, they tell me that I only speak about guys. I speak about what I know well. I speak about women with respect to the relationships

Figure 8: An interesting feminine character in comics: Véronique cries when her former lover and his friend leave her home, where they were hiding from the racist, far-right fi gure pursuing them. From Baru, L’autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, Y995), 369, panel 4. © Baru. 80 MARK MCKINNEY that I’ve always had with them, which is to say, both a relationship of desire and one of daily life, in any case, of proximity and as fi gures of the environments that I represent. The girls in Quéquette blues were from a working-class environment, with the relationship that one can have with them. McKinney: How do you view the comics heritage: for example, Yves-le- Loup, by René Bastard, which you bring into Les années Spoutnik, as well as Hergé, in the same story? What’s its importance for you? Baru: That’s a bit of a tricky question for me. It’s true that one could legitimately think that if I make comics, it’s because they’ve been produced in Europe, in France, since the end of the Second World War. And yet I wasn’t a reader of Tintin, so the fact that I make comics today isn’t due to that. It’s not because I read comics as a child or a young adolescent. In fact, I came to comics almost by chance and I affi liated myself more with the contemporary, modern form of comics than with their history. In other words, already when I was just a little kid, I didn’t want to make comics, I didn’t think I’d make them. I never drew comics, except occasionally, inspired by Yves-le-Loup and things like that. I enjoyed doing that, but it had no impact on the future. In fact, when I make comics, I rely more on all the images produced in the world of the media than those produced by comics alone. I believe, in fact I know, that if I make comics today, it’s thanks to Yves-le-Loup, Tintin, Spirou and all those comics. I feel deeply indebted to them. But I don’t at all make comics in reference to those ones. McKinney: But you also position your characters with respect to them. Baru: That’s the historian’s eye. It’s that comics are part of contemporary culture. I think that notably in France, but not only there – it’s the same in the United States – we are legions, thousands, millions of people who have read comics. So I naturally integrate them into my stories when it’s necessary, because today comics are part of our daily universe. When I represent Tintin in Les années Spoutnik, I do it more because friends have told me that they were really marked by Tintin, rather than due to my personal experience. I’d read relatively few Tintin stories. In fact, I saw more of them in circulation when I was twelve or thirteen, during pre-adolescence, than before. Before then I didn’t know that it existed. The magazine Vaillant was more my thing, but reading it never made me want to make comics (Fig. 9). My socio-cultural environment led me to read Vaillant. The values of the stories that I create are, roughly put – this may sound a bit stupid – leftist ones, or in any case, humanist Interview with Baru: Part 2 8ı

Figure 9: The infl uence of comics in a working-class, immigrant environment in France during the Y950s: Igor D’Alvise, of Italian background, shows a copy of the magazine Vaillant to his friend Carmen and tells her that he loves the classic comics character Yves-le-Loup [Yves-the-Wolf]. From Baru, Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] vol. 2: C’est moi le chef! [‘I’m the Chief!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2000), 26, panels Y0–YY. © Baru. ones. Perhaps it’s because that’s how the comics that I read as a child were constructed. Yves-le-Loup was a plea for the courage and the exemplarity of someone who defended the weak: he was always on the side of ordinary folk. Maybe I make the comics that I do because Yves- le-Loup was my hero when I was a kid. Maybe. But I think that there were others back there, other than him. There are other fi gures who are more important to me than Yves-le-Loup, for example, the resistance fi gure: the man who resists the violence that’s done to him and to those around him. That’s more where my roots lie, and so it’s necessarily what the stories that I tell are about, more than any explicit references to comics would be. I even read Franquin and Spirou very, very late. In fact, I read all the Tintin books only when some friends played a joke on me by buying the entire series for me when I was already making comics. I was thirty or thirty-fi ve at the time. Before that I had read a volume here or there, sporadically, without drawing inspiration from them. On the other hand, I began drawing comics thanks to Hara Kiri, Charlie mensuel and, later, A suivre, but not Pilote, because I didn’t read that. So I really began making comics because comics became modern. I don’t think that I would have made any if we hadn’t gone beyond Spirou and Tintin. That’s because I didn’t very well see how we could use that to deal with the questions that interested me, about the world in which I lived. 82 MARK MCKINNEY

McKinney: And yet you critique a certain critique of Tintin, of Hergé, in Les années Spoutnik: let’s call it a Communist critique (Fig. Y0). Baru: Yes, it’s true. But there too it’s really an adult’s perspective, which is how I read Tintin. Perhaps my father never told me that Tintin was a tool of capital, but I know that I heard others around me say that. I simply exaggerated it a bit, because it fi ts well in that spot and helped me to tie the plot together. So although it’s true that I’m relating something there that I heard, I always construct stories with things that I know, have heard or read, and not just personal experiences. So to answer your question simply: I have a distant relationship with the history of Franco-Belgian comics, but it’s a grateful one, because I know that it’s very important. I realize today, reading after the fact, as it were, that cartoonists such as Tillieux were geniuses of narration, powerful. Those people conjured up amazing images. Hergé did so, and it’s something quite different from the clear-line drawing style. I fi nd it reductionist to speak about Hergé in terms of the clear line. I’ve offered images that go well beyond the stylistic simplifi cation that he used. He offered total images, ones that, I fi nd, have a remarkable power. McKinney: What, for example? Baru: Of places, especially. For me, the image of Tintin is insignifi cant: he’s an ectoplasm. On the other hand, that ectoplasm got around in

Figure 10: Baru lampoons a Communist critique of Tintin in a comic set in Y957, the year that Sputnik Y was launched: in the fi rst panel a young French Communist tries to ingratiate himself with the party delegate by backing the criticism of the delegate’s son. In the second panel he requires that the boys, who painted their model rocket to look like Tintin’s, make it into a Communist one. In the third panel the boys and their teacher glower, but they will paint it all red in order to have it included in a welcome celebration for a visiting Communist offi cial from the USSR. From Baru, Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] vol. 3: Bip bip! [‘Beep Beep!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2002) 46, panels Y0–Y2. © Baru. Interview with Baru: Part 2 83 some amazing surroundings. I know that it wasn’t Hergé who drew them; he had others do it. But he willed them, so he’s somehow responsible for them. A port is a powerful thing in Hergé’s work: the port’s there, it’s concrete, really incarnated. But I could just as well mention a street, say in an Arab city, or things like that – a Bedouin door. Frankly, there are images in Hergé that leave me speechless. I tell myself that it’s more than a simple drawing there: it’s an image that goes beyond simple representation and carries a bit of something else, maybe mystery. In any case, that offers an emotional experience, which for me is the meaning of comics. So to reduce Hergé to a line is stupid. In any case it’s a blind alley from a theoretical standpoint. McKinney: The novel of apprenticeship seems to be one of the forms that you use. Baru: Yes, but I don’t use it as a form, by which I mean that I never consider the question of form when deciding to use that type of thing. I simply believe that it’s the most powerful mode of narration in existence. It brings together characters that are in a position of rupture, destabilized, searching, so that they’re open to all the events of the world: everything is possible. This type of situation brings forth an infi nity of possibilities, which endows it with an absolutely inexhaustible fecundity in terms of narration. So I’m naturally drawn toward it. In short, why doesn’t one ever put happy people on stage? Because nothing happens to them. So you put someone there who’s in a situation of rupture, who’s destabilized, and something will happen to him. That’s automatically a narrative motor, a wellspring of stories. The formal question is taken care of there. It’s as simple as that. I don’t do genre work: the novel of initiation, the road story, or something like that. I couldn’t care less about that. It’s not pertinent for me. It’s just a scholastic issue, as far as I’m concerned: determining recurring forms in order to establish statistical regularities. But for the person who creates the story, it’s not about telling yourself: ‘Say, I’m going to make a road story, or a wanderlust story.’ It’s there because it’s potentially the one that offers you the most questions. After that, you could perhaps decide to set limits on what you’re going to do, to challenge yourself, for example by saying, ‘Okay, I’ll limit myself to the space of a room.’ But there we’re more in the kind of constrained work that’s near and dear to Oubapo,3 rather than in the realm of a story that produces the kind of voluptuousness that can grab you when you have a monstrously

3 Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle [Workshop of Potential Comics]. 84 MARK MCKINNEY

Figure 11: The importance of the kitchen in Baru’s work: his fi ctional double begins the story in the kitchen with his mother, who is making Italian food. He will go out to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his friends. From Baru, Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005), 4, panel 6. © Baru. large fi eld of possibilities. Instead, you have a cramped thing, which is in fact a stylistic exercise. I’ve had fun doing that from time to time, but the only constraint that I accept is to melt into a collectivity. And there my thing is to break the lock of the collective so as to open the doors and work towards the outside, as I always do. In fact all of my stories are constructed in the same fashion: I begin inside and I go outside, always. Because nothing happens inside: it’s the place of all determinisms, which furthermore are exacerbated by the fact that the spaces are limited. So I aspire to one thing only: to take the characters and throw them outside, in order to escape from those determinisms and at the same time make things happen to them. Things always start inside for me: L’enragé starts in a kitchen, as did Quéquette blues (Fig. YY). That it often starts there is due to a psycho-social trait. Right now I’m participating in a collective exhibition with other artists from Nancy, which is directed by Guillaume Lab and is built like a house, with rooms.4 I chose the kitchen. It’s a somewhat bizarre exhibition. There are no pages. The drawings are there like wallpaper on walls that are seven meters long. So I asked them to put a real formica table in the center. The little story that I tell is about a kid at the kitchen table who’s writing the lines that the teacher made him do as punishment, but

4 The other artists were: Diego Aranega, Frédérique Bertrand, Frédéric Boilet, Sylvie Bessard, Romain Dutreix, Jochen Gerner, Yan Lindingre, Rémi Malingrëy, Jean-Marc Mathis, Nicolas Moog, Lefred Thouron. The installation, titled ‘La maison commune’, was open Y5 September to 30 October 20YY in the former Alstom factory, in Nancy. See http://lamaisoncommune.blogspot.com/ (consulted Y4 August 20Y2). Interview with Baru: Part 2 85 instead he simply leaves, because he doesn’t want to do them, and he goes outside. His mother, who’s coming back from the basement, is surprised to see him leave. Through an open door we can see that his father, who has come home from work, is sleeping. McKinney: How has your way of working changed over the years? Do you work more on the computer now? Baru: Basically things have gotten better, but it wasn’t always like this. From the beginning I’ve always more or less written the script fi rst. Now it’s systematic: I write the whole script. Then I have an intermediary phase – the rough. I work on the breakdown [le découpage] in a very, very small format: a page that’s half the size of A4 paper, and sometimes even a lot smaller than that. I put images in the rough and number them. Afterward I have another phase in the rough stage: I draw them really small, on A5 format paper, half the size of A4. There I work out the breakdown, write in my text and start to draw the characters, then to generate the images, fi rst in a somewhat sketchy manner, because I don’t have the characters. I work out the story like that, so as time passes the characters appear, and by the end I have my pencil drawings [crayonnés]. Afterward I move on to another phase: when the drawings are fi ne I enlarge them. Then I put the ink directly on my page, so as not to have too much pencil, to keep from erasing too much, in order to avoid problems later when I use water for the colors. Or when it’s a bit spoiled I redo the drawing next to it, but I always work in a small format and enlarge it later. And afterward I do the inking and the coloring. It’s a very, very classical process, a very old style. And later I use the computer after all. It’s a marvelous tool because it lets me make mistakes. Whereas beforehand when I spoiled a panel I had to start it over again, I don’t do that anymore. Even though my panel on the original is defective, I correct it later on the computer. I also correct my colors: a fl at tint [un aplat] that I messed up a bit, or things like that. However, it was a shock for me when computing appeared. I used it in a way that was almost hysterical. The last volume of Les années Spoutnik and all of L’enragé were the main victims in terms of the plate or the graphic effects [rendu graphique]. For L’enragé I pushed the envelope as far as I could, in a hysterical manner. Places are important in my work, as settings for the action, but I realized that it was fastidious work for me to keep reproducing the same place. So I made separate drawings, or larger ones, of the place in general, and after that I integrated or embedded portions of the place drawings into my images. So there 86 MARK MCKINNEY were only characters on all my plates, with nothing behind them. And going even beyond that I amused myself by drawing separate little characters that I put back into the image and combined, but afterwards I realized that I was spending a crazy amount of time on it. My images didn’t have any more power, and the process didn’t add anything to them: it didn’t make my images any more evocative. So I realized that I had worked myself into a corner of fancy-schmancy mannerisms, which had me producing images that were more and more overwrought. I realized that I was losing something along the lines of spontaneity. So it was the last time I did that. When the collectors see the plates from L’enragé they’re appalled. So I made the next book, Pauvres zhéros [‘Poor Zheros’], the way I had done before: all my plates are entirely drawn, with the imperfections. Now there are even imperfections that I no longer correct: that’s just the way they are. I think it’s more interesting that way. And now I’ve also changed tools. L’enragé was the last book that I drew with a drawing pen [à la plume], and then I began using a felt-tipped pen, which is closer to a pencil, in terms of movement. I did that because I realized that my penciled pages were always superior to my inked ones. My penciled pages with color radiate something, but I can’t use them because they have an arty side to them that’s completely disagreeable. I respect the comics code of well-mastered and properly closed shading. It’s something that a lot of artists from the new generation don’t do anymore and couldn’t care less about. I want to hold on to that, although I don’t know why. Maybe someday I’ll do as they do, which is to say, I’ll make a pencil drawing, which I’ll copy to thicken the line, and there you go, I’ll be done. After that I’ll just need to fi nd a good foundation layer on which to put water. I might come around to that, so I haven’t excluded the option. Beyond that, the computing is for fi xing the big mistakes. I create all my computer fi les and send them to the publishers. Sometimes I do end up changing the colors, when I realize that they weren’t right. McKinney: So how about your future projects? Baru: The next one is an adaptation of a book by Jean Vautrin, because he suggested it. I agreed to it because he’s a guy I really like, plus I had pretty good memories of what I had read. It had been a long time since I had read any Vautrin, and I had just read another one: a book titled Le roi des ordures [‘The Garbage King’], which I think can’t be adapted to comics. So I looked at his short stories. Right now I’m working on the script, the adaptation, because when I get my hands on a book, I have Interview with Baru: Part 2 87 an uncommon way of working, which is what I did with the book by Pierre Pelot. I fi nd that Jacques Tardi doesn’t adapt Vautrin’s work, he illustrates it. When he made Le cri du peuple [‘The Voice of the People’], with an enormous number of drawings and with drawn narrative sequences, it’s still Tardi, with big chunks of literature. It’s something that I don’t want to do, because I don’t think it would be worthwhile. It’s fi ne for Tardi, whose work is powerful. Maybe I refuse to do that kind of work because I think that I don’t have his power. In any case, I make an adaptation in the way that a cinematographer adapts a novel. I make a script from the literary source, which I then draw, with the author’s approval of course. With Pelot there weren’t any problems. I’m not sure what Vautrin will think, because he hasn’t yet seen my literary mastication of his books. So I’m going to be a bit devious! I’m going to offer to do it with old books that he may not remember anymore, and he’ll say, ‘Yes, sure, go ahead and do that.’ That’s a book for Casterman, and I might do the following one with Futuropolis, to have some more books with that publisher. That’s where I’ll put Bella ciao. Since it’s going to involve a succession of portraits, where there will be different characters and generations, I’d like to work with a format that’s a bit – not innovative, because it wouldn’t be that at all – but that would involve playing with different modes of publication: maybe something just on the web, and another bit in some journal, and another piece in an album, and then fi nally put it all together in a single work. For me that would be interesting because it would allow me to complete and publish each individual episode, and so to be visibly out there, whereas if I waited to fi nish everything it would be monstrous and would cause me to disappear for fi ve years, and people would think that I’m dead. McKinney: Could you speak about your work as a drawing professor? Baru: Sure, except that I’ve never taught drawing! In fact I taught narration through images. I could use drawing for that when the students were able to draw, which meant that when I had a group of thirty, there were a couple who could, and the others used what they were capable of, usually using little bits of video. It was at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Nancy [School of Fine Arts of Nancy]. I did that for fi fteen years, in the Communications major. Since it was narration through images, they could do it with photos or things like that. I spoke mostly about script-writing, so about how to launch one’s project and imagine 88 MARK MCKINNEY

a script, using some basic rules: the presentation, tying the plot together, then developing and twisting it. Silly little things like that, which aren’t really rules, but instead simply things that have always been used, ever since there were stories, whether by the Greeks or by the Papuans from Papua New Guinea, in their oral tradition. So I did that for fi fteen years, but I never taught drawing in the strict sense of the term. Drawing is the poor cousin in French art schools. They’re fi rst and foremost schools of art, which is to say the place of contemporary Academism: conceptual art, installations, etc. Drawing has been defi nitively confi ned to the trashcans of the history of art. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about art schools. I think that comics have been the real response by drawing, to that hegemony, to that ideological domination. And the fact that comics work, that people read them, thumbs its nose at it, although the sycophants, or at least the guard dogs, don’t accept that. Instead they roll comics into the gutter, because for them it’s junk, not art. So in response to the question ‘Are comics an art or not?’, I answer ‘Nuts.’ I couldn’t care less. The question is completely stupid, because it automatically means that the only way to answer it is through the rules that govern the artistic fi eld, and that’s not our fi eld. Period. Then there’s the question of whether cartoonists are artists. If the answer is yes, then I think that Le Facteur Cheval [The Postman Cheval] was also an artist,5 and that a guy who makes videos is an artist too. So if everyone’s an artist, then no one is, so who cares? I sure don’t want to hear any talk about a ninth art. McKinney: Did that make it diffi cult to work in the School of Fine Arts? Baru: Diffi cult, no. There was rejection by some colleagues, but not all of them: some were simply curious and open-minded. But there was confl ict whenever one questioned the legitimacy of the work of the art school, and especially from the professors of culture [de culture générale], who were the guard dogs. That wasn’t diffi cult for me, because I like confl ict: when they came looking for me, they knew where to fi nd me, and they rarely had the last word, because after all, I can prove my points. On the other hand, things went pretty well with the students, and we quickly built a major that was in the opposition. It was in another realm. It was different from the artistic fi eld and drew its legitimacy from the wealth of emotions that it called up, and no longer from the benevolence of the dominant major. Of course that created major confl icts. Frankly, the struggle for power in places or institutions like

5 Joseph Ferdinand Cheval (Y836–Y924). Interview with Baru: Part 2 89 that is a daily battle. Of course the main argument was, ‘Yes, but you’re always saying bad things about us,’ whereas in fact we never talked about them. To that they responded, ‘but it’s because you’re suffering from an inferiority complex,’ since there were just three of us in charge of the Communications major. You know that today the ‘Communications’ label is quite rightly devalued, to the point that even the successive directors of the School tried to change it. To that we answered back, ‘No! Communications!’ We simply added ‘of a social nature’ to that title just to piss them off even more. That basically meant that we were interested in how the world turns and in proposing answers to it. We didn’t care about the form: it could involve painted canvas, photo novels, fl ipbooks, as well as drawings or comics. McKinney: Did any cartoonists come out of your program? Baru: Not a single one. Objectively today we’re beginning to see cartooning schools. There have been some in Belgium for a long time, and there are some now in France too, often private ones. But the young people who go off to the great institutions like Olivier de Serres [ENSAAMA] and les Gobelins often have such a high level of graphic virtuosity that they have practically nothing left to learn about drawing. On the other hand, when it comes to knowing how to put together a story, it’s a completely different situation: they still have a lot left to learn. So with my students, who weren’t good at drawing, we worked on narration, which was good for them, but that’s as far as it went. No, none became a cartoonist, although there were a few who could have done so at a certain point. I tried to encourage them to persevere, but it’s hard afterwards, when you leave the School and fi nd yourself all alone.

Baru’s Comic Books in French La piscine de Micheville [‘The Micheville Pool’] (Paris: Dargaud, Y985). La communion du Mino [‘Mino’s Communion’] (Paris: Futuropolis, Y985). Vive la classe! [‘Long Live the Draftees!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Paris: Futuropolis, Y987). Cours camarade! [‘Run Comrade!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Paris: Albin Michel, Y988). Le chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’] with Jean-Marc Thévenet (script) and Daniel Ledran (colors) (Paris: Albin Michel, Y990). L’autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, Y995). 90 MARK MCKINNEY

Sur la route encore [‘On the Road Again’] (Tournai: Casterman, Y997). Bonne année [‘Happy New Year’] (Tournai: Casterman, Y998). Le chemin de l’Amérique [‘Road to America’] (Tournai: Casterman, Y998). Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] vol. Y: Le penalty [‘The Penalty’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, Y999). Les années Spoutnik [The Sputnik Years] vol. 2: C’est moi le chef! [‘I’m the Chief!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2000). Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] vol. 3: Bip bip! [‘Beep Beep!’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2002). Les années Spoutnik [‘The Sputnik Years’] vol. 4: Boncornards têtes-de- lard! [‘Stubborn-Headed Cuckolds!’] colors Daniel Ledran and Baru (Tournai: Casterman, 2003). L’enragé [‘The Angry Man’] vol. Y, colors Baru and Daniel Ledran (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2004). Quéquette blues [‘Weenie Blues’] colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2005). [fi rst ed. Y984–Y986] L’enragé [‘The Angry Man’] vol. 2, colors Baru and Daniel Ledran (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 2006). L’autoroute du soleil [‘Highway of the Sun’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2008). Pauvres Zhéros [‘Poor Zheros’] with Pierre Pelot (script) (Tournai: Casterman, 2008). Les années Spoutnik: Edition intégrale [‘The Sputnik Years: Complete Edition’], colors Daniel Ledran (Tournai: Casterman, 2009). Noir [‘Black’] (Tournai: Casterman, 2009). L’enragé: édition intégrale [‘The Angry Man: Complete Edition’] (Marcinelle: Dupuis, 20Y0). Fais péter les basses Bruno! [‘Blow Out the Bass Speakers, Bruno!’] (Paris: Futuropolis, 20Y0). Villerupt 1966: Quéquette Blues, La piscine de Micheville, Vive la classe! [‘Villerupt Y966: Weenie Blues, The Micheville Pool, Long Live the Draftees!’] (Montreuil: Les Rêveurs, 20Y0).

Baru’s Comics in English Translation ‘Tour de France’, trans. Deborah Bonner, Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, Raw 8 (Y986), 69–77. ‘Public baths’, trans. Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, Raw 2.Y (Y989), Y7Y–Y74. ‘The road to America’, part Y, trans. Helge Dascher, Drawn and Quarterly 2.4 (December Y995), 2–Y9. Interview with Baru: Part 2 9ı

‘The road to America’, part 2, trans. Helge Dascher, Drawn and Quarterly 2.5 (April Y996), 30–43. ‘The road to America’, part 3, trans. Helge Dascher, Drawn and Quarterly 2.6 (June Y997), 48–63. Road to America, trans. Helge Dascher (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2002).

Published Scholarship on Baru’s Comics Mark McKinney, ‘The Algerian War in Road to America (Baru, Thévenet, Ledran)’, History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Mark McKinney (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), Y39–Y65. Ann Miller, ‘Narratives of adolescence, ethnicity and masculinity in the work of Baru’, The Francophone Bande Dessinée, ed. Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove and Libbie McQuillan (New York: Rodopi, 2005), Y37–Y48. Ann Miller, ‘Chapter Five: The Codes and Formal Resources of Bande dessinée’, Reading Bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French- Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), 75–Y02. Andreas Platthaus, ‘Chronist der Aussenseiter: Baru und Frankreichs Strassen’ [Chronicler of the Outsider: Baru and the Streets of France], Im Comic Vereint: Eine Geschichte der Bildgeschichte [‘United in Comics: A History of the Comic Strip’] (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, Y998). Interview with Guy Delisle

Conducted in English by Kenan Kocak, 23 April 2014

Guy Delisle was born in Canada’s Quebec City in 1966. He studied an- imation at Sheridan College in Oakville, near Toronto, and has worked for animation companies in Canada, France, Germany, China and North Korea. His comics career started at L’Association, where from 1995 onwards he contributed to the French periodical Lapin, whilst also working on the Canadian magazine Spoutnik. Delisle is also an active animator strongly associated with Dupuis-Audiovisuel. He has just fi n- ished the third volume of his current series, Le Guide du mauvais père [A Users Guide to Neglectful Parenting], which will be available in January 2015. In 2012, Chroniques de Jérusalem (Delcourt) won the Angoulême fes- tival’s Best Album award. In it, Delisle follows on from previous travel accounts, in particular Shenzhen (L’Association, 2000, about China), Pyongyang (L’Association, 2003, about North Korea) and Chroniques birmanes (Delcourt, 2007, about Burma). In all of these he presents foreign, exotic and sometimes oppressive cultures through the every- day. In the case of the Jerusalem album, this is done via his own expe- riences as a child-minding father whilst his partner, Nadège, worked there for Médecins Sans Frontières in 2008. The style of Chroniques de Jérusalem, like that of Delisle’s earlier work, is that of line drawings with clear representational elements, whilst remaining far from any notion of photo-realism. A main dif- ference, perhaps due to the possibilities offered by Delcourt is the use of sepia tone and splashes of colour, albeit sparsely, to accentuate key incidents and objects. The style draws the reader in and situates the story in an exegetic ‘reality’, whilst keeping the distance that comes with caricature. It fi ts perfectly with the subject matter, one that pres- ents traffi c jams and the search for children’s playgrounds, allowing us momentarily to overlook the background events, those of the religious confl icts in the Middle East.

European Comic Art Volume 7 Number 2, Autumn 2014: 90–114 doi:10.3167/eca.2014.070205 ISSN 1754–3797 (Print), ISSN 1754–3800 (Online) Interview with Guy Delisle 91

Although the book was a popular choice that frequently topped the weekly BD best sellers, it was also very much in keeping with literary trends within the graphic novel genre and beyond. Indeed, the non-A4 format, low-colour artwork and 334 pages keeps the work within the ‘graphic novel’ style championed by L’Association, Delisle’s previous publisher, and continued by the high-profi le but trendy Shampooing collection to which the album belongs. Through the subject matter of the Middle East confl ict, comparison with Jo Sacco is inevitable, although Delisle is considerably less politicised. Another point in common is the fi rst-person diary format, although the viewing angle remains third person, as we look onto the line drawing of Delisle, not directly through his eyes. And the use of the everyday as a foreground to broader events plugs into the current trend for ‘everyday studies’, whilst putting the BD alongside other forms of ‘popular but intelligent’ literature that presents world-changing events via the backcloth of the preoccupations of ordinary life, as recently championed by the novels of Jean Teulé, Annie Ernaux and Jonathan Coe. In this interview Guy Delisle broaches the key questions of artistic inspiration, personal priorities, national affi nities, the links between animation and comics, and the practical constraints that direct artistic production.1

KENAN KOCAK: What does producing or creating bande dessinée, or comics, mean to you? Why do you produce? Why do you do comics?

GUY DELISLE: Well, that’s a big question. Because I like to draw and I like to tell stories, and I was working in animation, [where] for me, after a certain point I felt frustrated because it was not my drawing, it was not my ideas, it was not my design. And at the same time, I was doing my own short stories for magazines and I really enjoyed doing my own stories, my own design. I always thought about that when I was young. I always read comics and I found the opportunities to do short stories and I was thinking I would do that as long as I can, and then it became bigger stories and it became books. And it all moved gradually. I didn’t start doing drawings. One day at my table thinking, ‘Oh, I am going to do books and publish them’, I just started with an idea for short stories and I had seen a magazine that was doing some independent stuff, and

1 Much of the material from this introduction is based on Laurence Grove, Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), xiv–xv. 92 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

I thought maybe that magazine is going to like what I do. So, yeah, it goes down to because I like it.

KENAN KOCAK: When did you decide to switch from animation to comics? Exactly which year, do you remember it? Was it after Shenzhen?

GUY DELISLE: No, by the time I did Shenzhen I was already doing comics. Shenzhen was in ’97. I guess I started to do short stories around ’95. Because when I came back from Shenzhen, I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I can do a few short stories with the stuff that happened to me in China’, and then it became the fi rst part of Shenzhen. It was not planned to be a

Figure 1: ‘Me revoilà en Chine . . .’ Guy Delisle, Shenzhen (Paris: L’Association, 2000), 3. Interview with Guy Delisle 93 book. I was doing short stories before that, so I would say, yeah, around ’93, ’94, ’95.

KENAN KOCAK: Now you have settled down into the south of France after having been to various ‘dangerous’ places worldwide, how do you feel? Do you not miss those days? Are you happy with your current life?

GUY DELISLE: No, I don’t miss those days. It was very nice to do it when it was possible to do it. And I have the feeling that I fulfi lled that part of travelling a lot. For me, it was more of a family reason to stop, be- cause the kids were a bit bigger and we knew we wouldn’t do that for our lives. So, it was the time for us to stop and it was a good time, because everybody is happy with that situation – me, my wife, my children, not to travel anymore! And yes, we did it, and it was a good time to do it, and for me, actually doing four books about travelling was enough because doing a fi fth one would have been too much, I think. Maybe when I get old, I’ll have some very interesting experience, and I might do one. But now, it’s very nice for me to do different books because it’s nice to do comics and it’s nice to change and have different styles. So, yeah, that’s a big freedom. If you keep doing always the same type of books, you can lose that freedom potential you have in comic books.

KENAN KOCAK: But please don’t give up producing graphic novels, because we really look forward to reading another Jerusalem, Shenzhen or Pyongyang.

GUY DELISLE: Thanks! I am still doing a kind of autobiography. Be- cause I do the books with my children, you know, the one about being a father.

KENAN KOCAK: The Neglectful Parents.

GUY DELISLE: So, this is some kind of autobiography, except it is not on travelling, it is more on everyday life.

KENAN KOCAK: Yes, absolutely. I have read the fi rst volume, but I believe the second one has not been translated into English?

GUY DELISLE: No, they are translating right now, so they are going to release it in a few months, I guess. 94 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

Figure 2: Guy Delisle, Le Guide du mauvais père, vol. 1 (Paris: Del- court, 2013), 22–23.

KENAN KOCAK: How far do you feel that your training as a fi lm ani- mator has affected your production of graphic novels or comic albums, especially given their references to your animation work? How do you feel the connection between them?

GUY DELISLE: Well, I have been thinking about that recently, and I think that when you do animation, especially as an animator, I was not doing storyboards. Of course, if I was working on storyboards, it would be easy to think that once you do a storyboard, then you switch to a comic book. But I was an animator, so I have spent my time trying to work on the movement. And one thing you do when you are an anima- tor is you have to observe. So, I think that is one thing I have learned from doing animation. You have to observe movements, but I have ob- served . . . more than that, I think. When I travel, I look at small details, I think this comes from animation, and when you are an animator, you have to learn to design the movement in different parts, like the antic- ipation, the movement as the second part, and then the rest, and you really have to work on that. I think I have applied the same system to a narration, to a storytelling narration, for which you have to have differ- ent parts where you start the story. I think this system of observing and observing movement, I have put that into my life as an observer. And I have put that into my storytelling as well. Interview with Guy Delisle 95

KENAN KOCAK: And I think that your training in animation has af- fected works such as Albert and the Others and Aline and the Others. We see the effect of your training as an animator in these two books, I think, because you are trying to exceed the boundaries of the comics. What do you think about this?

Figure 3: ‘Albert’. Guy Delisle, Albert and the Others (Montreal: Drawn & Quar- terly, 2007), 1. 96 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

GUY DELISLE: Yes, it really is about a link between the movement and comic books. And it came right after I was doing animation. When I was doing animation I was thinking, maybe we could use the movement in some stories to try to describe just a moment in one page or so. I was thinking, you know, it would be nice to shrink time or compress time on just one page or have the time, for example, a year, passing from one image to another one, very quickly or very slowly. So I played with that in my short stories. I have it in one of my fi rst short stories: I have a whole life passing in two pages; the character is saying one letter and the whole letter makes the sentence of life pass so quickly! You have that sentence to show the two pages of a life. And so I was playing with time and I was thinking when I was an animator that we could do that in the comic book. When I had the chance to do short stories I was thinking, ‘Oh, I am going to try to do like a short fi lm’, because all these short stories could be short animation fi lms, basically.

KENAN KOCAK: Yes, defi nitely, and you did it really successfully, I think.

GUY DELISLE: Thanks. And I have also used that method afterwards. It is a very good exercise to do a story with no text because you realise you can actually see a lot of things, and I did the same thing when I was in Burma. I had to describe these movements where we were tourists and we were going to this nice place, but I did not want to talk about how nice it was, and I decided to use that technique where you have all very quick, small images, and so for me it is like a narration tool that I have developed. I applied it fi fteen years later in Burma Chronicles be- cause I thought, ‘Yes, that is a good solution as a narration to tell what I want but quickly, with no details.’

KENAN KOCAK: There are some differences between the French and English editions of your graphic novels. In English translations, they added subtitles, for example, when it is just Shenzhen in French, in En- glish it is Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, or Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, and especially your last graphic novel, Chroniques de Jéru- salem, was published with the addition of the words ‘Holy City’. I see them as a bit problematic because these subtitles allow us to read your comics only as travelogues or chronicles. And the words ‘Holy City’ are a bit confusing. Whose Holy City is Jerusalem? Muslims? Jews? Or Christians? What do you think about this? Interview with Guy Delisle 97

GUY DELISLE: Well, it is something that I do not really have control over. It is the publisher, the English publisher. I remember, he told me about Pyongyang, he said, ‘We have to add a subtitle because in the United States, nobody knows what Pyongyang is, and if we do not add a subtitle people are not going to know that it is in Korea.’ So they really wanted to underline, to make a statement that it was somewhere in North Korea. So I thought at length, you know, and said, ‘If you think it is best, I do not really mind actually’, because for me, I do not see the translation, I see one book and then they are gone and so I leave, I trust the publisher and if they do not want to put a certain colour on the cover, usually I go with them and that applies to the rest as well. So, for Shenzhen, they did Shenzhen after they added the subtitle on Pyongyang. And they said, ‘We are going to put a subtitle on Shenzhen, one which says Travelogue in China or something like that.’ So they did the same for Jerusalem: The Holy City. Well, the city is holy for the three religions. They do not change a lot by putting that. Because it is actually three times holy: it is holy for the Muslims, it is holy for the Christians and it is holy for the Jews. So, I think that the ‘Holy City’ can fi t to the three major religions that are there. So, for me, I do not really control that, and it is a bit up to them if they want to put that on the title. I have put all the translations of my books on my blog. I have one in Czech and there is a subtitle on it. I just have no idea what the subtitle means, really.

KENAN KOCAK: And they have changed the front covers of your books as well.

GUY DELISLE: Yes, they keep changing. Not so much for Jerusalem, because I did try to control the one for Jerusalem and try to say, ‘Well, enough of all these changes, I would like to keep the cover I have done.’ But it is really hard to do that because sometimes, for instance, in Asia, there is one cover that is very strange in Taiwan, I think. We do not have a lot of control. They just send the book and we say we do not like it and then you do not hear from them. Well, I do not think about that so much. So, after that, I guess they just really adapt them, that is it. But, for some reason, publishers sometimes have a collection. So they have to fi t the graphics to put into the collection, which is not such a good idea. And sometimes they just want to change the drawing for, I do not know for what reason, they do not like the cover. It is a bit like movies and their posters. They keep changing in every country, I do not know why. 98 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

Figure 4: Guy Delisle drawing in front of city wall, cover, Guy Delisle, Chro- niques de Jérusalem (Paris: Delcourt, 2011).

KENAN KOCAK: And also in English translations, the location that you are going to be is shown on the map, but we don’t see it in French editions. Is it the same selling strategy?

GUY DELISLE: No, I forgot to put them in French once [laughs]. They forgot to put the map in. And when I realised that, I said, ‘Wow’, you know. For Jerusalem, especially in France, I think most people know more or less where it is. And within the book I have a lot of small maps and I think that is OK. And I thought after a while, it is going to be a problem, but since it was with the book, I guess the other countries received the whole fi le. They did not forget the fi rst page and they put it in the book.

KENAN KOCAK: As far as I know, in one of your interviews, you said that you do not read or undertake any research about the country where you will be living for a while. Why do you prefer this? How does it affect your life there? Do you prefer to learn by experiencing your daily life? Interview with Guy Delisle 99

GUY DELISLE: There is a bit of that. It depends, it is different for every country. Before going to China, twenty years ago, I was a much younger person. And I did not read about the country, I just wanted to see China: I was very excited to go there. When I came back, I read a lot of books about China, the history of China, the revolution [Cultural Revolution] and all that stuff. I thought it was fascinating. And then, for Pyongyang, I read beforehand. I read as many books as I could, be- cause I knew that before going there, once I was there, if I asked a ques- tion, they would give me the answer that pleased them. And I thought, ‘Well, I am going to read as much as I can. So, I will know about the country and I will be able to ask them questions, and know the answer that we have here, to see what they say so as to compare.’ For Burma, it was different. We were going there for a year and I thought, ‘Well, once I am there, I am going to be surrounded by the people that work in MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] and they have been there for years; they know the whole country very well.’ And that is what happened. I was there for a year. I met journalists, I met people from the UN, from the Red Cross, and they knew the country very well, and some of them knew it really well. And some of them had actually met [Burmese oppo- sition leader] Aung San Suu Kyi, and some of them had been there for eight years. And they knew the country very well. And the same thing happened in Jerusalem. I did not know much about the country. We only knew one month before we left that we were going to Jerusalem. So, there was not much I could do in one month. And I looked at a few pictures and I thought it looked nice and we would see how it was there. And the same again, once I was there, I was there for a year. I could not spend the year reading books about the country. I did read a few while I was there. I read the books people advised me to read. I was with lots of friends; some of them were journalists, from the UN [United Nations] and from the Red Cross. And they knew the country very well as well.

KENAN KOCAK: And you also learned many things from them in Je- rusalem? From the people who work for Médecins Sans Frontières and the other organisations?

GUY DELISLE: Yeah, and the UN, the Red Cross, some of them were journalists from famous English newspapers and they knew the coun- try very well. And I was learning on my own by just walking around and looking at stuff, but sometimes I was thinking how come this works like this here, how come you need papers to go there, and they would 100 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK know and they would say, ‘Oh, it is because this was granted there and they decided to do it this way because blah blah blah . . .’ In this way it would be very quick to get information.

KENAN KOCAK: In my thesis, I am writing a chapter on nationalism and national identities, and their interaction with graphic novels. What does nationalism or national identity mean to you?

GUY DELISLE: Oh, for me, like my nationality is Canadian, which I still feel.

KENAN KOCAK: What do you think about nationalism or patriotism?

GUY DELISLE: Oh, patriotism. Indeed, I do not hold this value very strongly. Probably because I am from Quebec and when you are from Quebec, you are from the French part and you are part of Canada, of course, but you don’t really feel that you are part of Canada when you are in Quebec, but you feel it when you go outside the country. But you feel that you are from the French part of Canada. We have the English and the French [Canadians], so we do not have deep roots for patriotism, at least not for the whole country. A lot of French Canadi- ans have very strong patriotic roots for Quebec, but I do not really have that either. And given that I moved when I was twenty – I moved to France – and have roots in France now, I feel that I’m half French and half Canadian. So it is hard to feel patriotic when you have parts from different countries, because which one are you going to choose? But I think if there were, for example, a basketball game, and it was France against Canada, I would go for Canada. I would give my vote to them. So I guess, I am more patriotic for the Canadian side.

KENAN KOCAK: Actually, Quebec identity is my next question. Does that Quebecois identity affect the way you portray other national identities?

GUY DELISLE: Well, of course, when you are from a minority – be- cause Quebec is a minority in North America – well, then you tend to see the other minorities in that perspective. Coming to France, you look at the language in the south of France, and you have to think about whether you are going to learn that language, since if you are in Que- bec the English speakers have to learn French, so you do have a reac- tion like that because you have been in that situation. So I guess this Interview with Guy Delisle 101 also gives a perspective in countries like Burma, there are so many mi- norities right now, there is actually a lot of trouble with all the islands, where very small minorities are having a very tough time. It is surpris- ing that Burma is doing that to these minorities, now that it is a much freer country. I have this kind of reaction, I don’t know, maybe because I am Canadian and it is a minority, but I guess it is a part of my culture.

KENAN KOCAK: How do you use visual and verbal irony to refl ect national differences? How do you depict nationalities in your comics? For example, how can you show people from different religions in Je- rusalem? Or how do you distinguish yourself or Europeans in your Shenzhen, Burma or Pyongyang? How do you achieve this?

GUY DELISLE: In Burma, it was easy to draw Burmese people, because if you draw a guy, you have the Asian face and you can really portray that easily, as with all the Asian countries, it is easy to draw the people because they have a distinct face. Especially in Burma, the guys were all wearing those long skirts; it was easy to show it was a Burmese person. The con- text helped a lot because if I go outside on the street in Burma, people know that I am going to meet some- one from outside the coun- try, that it is going to be a foreigner. So the context helped a lot to explain that. In Jerusalem, it was differ- ent because in Jerusalem, I could be mistaken for a local person, I remember people would talk to me in Hebrew. Because they have so many different roots, I mean European, they all have very different faces. So, I needed to specify that in this context but not to explain them. I don’t really Figure 5: Guy Delisle, Chroniques birmanes have to explain. (Paris: Delcourt, 2007), 94. 102 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

KENAN KOCAK: Could we say that you follow national stereotypes, or Oriental stereotypes, for Jerusalem?

GUY DELISLE: There were no Oriental stereotypes for Jerusalem. That’s one thing. They look like Europeans, so there were no Asians, and some of them are red-haired and they have blue eyes, so apart from that, if you want to draw an Orthodox Jew, then it is easy because with the black hat and the long beard that they have, it is going to be the guys like that, and it’s mostly with the way they dress. I would depict the ladies that are wearing long dress and the veil like the Muslim ladies, and it was easy to know where they are from, in my neighbourhood they all look[ed] like that. They all wear the headscarf and the long dress. And so, yes, for the foreigner it was easy. It is just like when you travel, if I go to Tur- key, which is quite European, and I were to draw the people, you would know that they are all Turkish, and they can be tourists as well, but that is not really my problem. I mean, if I am taking a picture I do not really have to know who are in front of the camera. I just take a picture of the country and I will draw the people in front of me without knowing where they are from. Some of them can be just tourists, I do not mind.

KENAN KOCAK: Have you ever been to Turkey?

GUY DELISLE: I have been, but from Israel. Actually, I have been on a very quick travel visit just to Antalya, which is a very touristic area. And we really needed to have a relaxing time, having been in Israel for half of a year. And we had a discount deal which was just next to the ocean and it was just relaxing and very nice. And the people were just fantastic. The children loved it as well. It is good. It is fantastic. I would like to go to Turkey.

KENAN KOCAK: In Jerusalem, I recognised that you did not draw the face of the Prophet Muhammad when you drew him on the horse.

GUY DELISLE: I was worried because I know that it can be big trou- ble. Look at the movie about Noah. They are showing it right now, it has been banned in lots of Muslim countries because it portrays God somehow, and they do not like that over there. Yeah, I have managed to put the wing over his face, so I did not face any problems.

KENAN KOCAK: My other questions will be about comics journalism, because I am writing a chapter on comics journalism. What do you Interview with Guy Delisle 103

Figure 6: The Prophet Muhammad. Guy Delisle, Chroniques de Jérusalem (Paris: Delcourt, 2011). think about comics journalism? As far as I know, you say that you do not do journalism like Joe Sacco does. But I analyse your works as comics journalism, because I believe that your works are more journal- istic than Joe Sacco’s. The only difference between you and Joe Sacco is your style: Joe Sacco draws very realistically, and you use basic and clear lines, and behind them we see a very realistic depiction of the 104 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK environment. We can learn very specifi c things from Sacco, such as the massacre that happened in the past in Footnotes in Gaza, for which it was very hard for him to fi nd people still alive who could talk about it; we also learn very many things from your books thanks to your experi- ence, your daily experience. And I personally think your journalism is actually better, because you are just showing us what you see. What do you think about this? Can we call you a comics journalist?

GUY DELISLE: I do not know. I do not feel like a journalist. Joe Sacco is a journalist. He goes to Gaza; he knows what he is going to do, he knows he is going to work on 1956 somewhere in Gaza. He works with archives and all that. But me, I do not even know if I am going to do a book, or I go to Jerusalem because I was travelling with my wife, but I thought I would take notes. If anything interesting comes up during the year, if I can work on a book I do not know how far I could go. If something happens which is very exciting in a country, I do not think I am going to go there. I had the chance to see some of the fi ghting over Gaza during the war when we were there. And of course a journalist would go there; my friend asked me if I wanted to go and I said, ‘I do not feel like watching these poor guys dying with F16 bombs’, so I did not go. That was not a very journalistic reaction. But it is true that I put some information in: sometimes it’s just information like when I explain what the Dome of the Rock represents, and I explained some religious stuff, so that part is more pedagogic, it is like teaching, so I have a bit of that. Then I like to mix that with everyday life, my life, so the people know what kind of guy you are, what kind of life you have when you are in Jerusalem and what kind of stuff you get to see, with the people you meet and from the people that are not very pleas- ant with you, and all the religions I have met. So, this is not so much journalism. This is more like daily life. It is a diary. And for me, when I do that, I do not feel like I am doing journalism. I really feel that I am doing something like a long postcard that I would send to my fam- ily to explain to them, because there is some explanation needed here and there, such as what the situation is, what I saw while I was there, everything which is funny, strange for me or interesting. I put them in the book according to my notes, of course, it is everything I have just seen there. So that’s why for me it’s much more, as someone said once, more like anthropologists would do, which I kind of agree [with] because I go outside and I take very small details and with these small details after a year you have pictures of the whole thing. But I can look at the garbage and think, ‘Wow, we do not do that the same way here Interview with Guy Delisle 105 and why do they put bread on the outside of the garbage can’, and just with these small observations I like to explain the bigger thing some- how. And I think this is more observation. You try to do it on your own. But I do not try to do all the analysis. I leave the analysis to the reader. I just present the stuff I have seen and from that, you can make up your own mind. That is the good thing about comics. I can just show and I do not have to say, ‘They do not look at the poor Palestinians they are going to shoot’, terrible, which is true, everybody can agree with that. But if you write it, it does not have the same impact, and if you just show what it is to go to a checkpoint, you say nothing, you just show the way it is, and everybody will go, ‘Wow. This is a little bit crazy.’ And you do not have to say it, and I think it is better.

KENAN KOCAK: Do you think that comics journalism can be an alternative journalism to show the things that it is not possible to see in mainstream journalism? For example, your Pyongyang is still one of the few works showing life inside North Korea. Do you think comics journalism can be an alternative?

GUY DELISLE: Well, the prob- lem with comics journalism is it takes a long time and today journalism, with Internet, you have to go very, very quickly; sometimes too quickly. But for something like Pyongyang, that kind of reportage is different Figure 7: ‘Tout près de Koryo’. Guy because I was in the perfect sit- Delisle, Pyongyang (Paris: L’Association, uation, I was able to remember 2003), 123. and draw, and this would not have been possible with a camera or with a movie camera. There is no way I would have been able to show all that, but with comics it was perfect. I could just remember touring that museum and then I could just read it, read my notes and remember it and draw it, and for that drawing was perfect and I guess unique because there is no 106 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

[other] way you could do that; you can do text, but it is different. I have read books about people who have been there, but to be able to show what you think somehow, that was very different, and for that I guess it was a unique way to do it because of Pyongyang. In most of the other countries you do not have that, you can take pictures, but for that one especially it was very useful.

KENAN KOCAK: Why did you decide to use colours in Jerusalem?

GUY DELISLE: Because I had the opportunity to do it, because the other books were all planned to be with a small publishing house and they cannot afford to do colour. But Jerusalem, I knew from the start that would be with a bigger one, and they said we can do colour and I knew that it would not be too expensive. Even though it is 300 pages I would do colour. But it would not be too expensive. So I thought, ‘Well, I would like to have a few colours.’ I did not use many.

KENAN KOCAK: Especially for maps and exclamations you use colours.

GUY DELISLE: Yeah, for sound. And it really comes out. But Jerusa- lem is a very monochromatic city because they use the same stones. They have to, they have no choice. And it all comes out. It is like beige everywhere. So that’s what I wanted to represent with the colours.

KENAN KOCAK: Yes, and, for example, you use red to depict the gun- shot or you use yellow to show people shouting. How do you choose them? Why did you use, for example, red for gunshot and yellow for shouting?

GUY DELISLE: Well, it is something you do in comics. In children’s comics, for example, there is some violent scene, there is some action or gunshot, and they put the whole image in red and I used to have to just do sound. That is frustrating. In comic books you do not have sound; you just write the sounds in words, but it has never really, really worked. So with a little splash of colour, especially when it is a gun, red is like a violent colour. So I thought, you know, I did not invent that, I just used what I have seen, and throughout the book you have just a few spots when it was like a shocking sound or something like that, yelling, and I just look at it and then on the page it looks nice, I just want a spot of colour. Interview with Guy Delisle 107

KENAN KOCAK: If we turn back to Shenzhen, in Shenzhen, you use Chi- nese letters for some conversations, possibly the ones when you cannot understand what they say, whereas in some parts you translate them. And we do not see that style in your other works. Why did you abandon it? Why haven’t you used the same technique for your other works?

GUY DELISLE: The situation was different in China, because I was in a translation situation, so I had to explain, so that is something you can do in comics. Someone is talking to you and you do not understand at all what he is saying, but it is like a cloudy image. So you can do that, you can have someone shouting and you can do just rubbish stuff. But I was not confronted with that in the other countries, because there was no translator and I was in an English-speaking country like in Burma, [or] in Jerusalem, that never really happened, but in China, yeah, and I do not think I would use that technique now. I add a few Arabic words in Jerusalem, and I do not know, at that time I thought that is the way to transpose the experience I had in China. And today maybe I would do it differently.

KENAN KOCAK: Yes, as far as I recognised, you use the same charac- ter that you used in Albert and the Others in Jerusalem, right? I cannot remember his name, but with a fez on his head. You use the same guy in Jerusalem.

GUY DELISLE: Oh, really? Is there . . . ? Yes, because they have the fez in Jerusalem. They wear the fez especially in the old pictures. If you look at the old pictures of the Palestinians they all wear the fez. And I fi nd that hat very funny.

KENAN KOCAK: But when you draw the Ottoman sultan in Jerusa- lem, you made a chronological mistake there because the fez was intro- duced into the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, but the time that you were talking about is the sixteenth century.

GUY DELISLE: Ah, OK. I did not know that [laughs].

KENAN KOCAK: I think it was only me who noticed it!

KENAN KOCAK: It is not possible to see the fez in the sixteenth cen- tury. It was in the nineteenth century. Anyway, if we turn back again to 108 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

Figure 8: Jerusalem Fez, Guy Delisle, Chroniques de Jérusalem (Paris: Delcourt, 2011), 222.

Shenzhen, in Shenzhen you use wordless full-page splashes to separate your chapters. I fi nd that some of them are related to the chapters that they separate, but some of them are not related. For example, what is the underlying signifi cance of the three frames at the start of chapter 8 of Shenzhen, which depict an elegant Chinese woman entering a tradi- tional building and, if appropriate, what interrelationship is intended between them? Interview with Guy Delisle 109

Figure 9: Guy Delisle, Schenzen (Paris: L’Association, 2000), opening for chap- ter 8.

GUY DELISLE: I think I was mentioning the work of the Chinese artist that I discovered when I was there, and I think I have been collecting a lot of these small books that you can fi nd in the streets of China. And I mention at one point, maybe it is not in that chapter, but [at] a certain point, I was infl uenced by the way the Chinese draw, and I have tried to do some work, like even the beginning of a comic book, and that one page of the comic book I was working on after being infl uenced by the 110 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

Chinese graphic artist. So, that is the reason it is there. But I do not know if it is in the right chapter, because I guess I like that page and I thought, ‘Wow, I am going to use it.’

KENAN KOCAK: You don’t follow the same style, for example, in Shen- zhen, you divide your book into sixteen-page chapters, but you do not follow the same for your other works. Why did you abandon it?

GUY DELISLE: Because Shenzhen was prepublished in a magazine and in that magazine you do sixteen pages because it is a printing size. You can have your own paper if you want within the magazine. It is the printing system, where it is folded in sixteen pages. So that was the reason, because Shenzhen started as a magazine short story. And then I did one chapter and I thought, ‘Wow, I am going to do the second one’, because I liked it. Then I said, ‘I am going to do the third one’, and then people started to really enjoy it. And we thought, ‘Wow, why not do a book?’ And then I said, ‘OK. I am going to stop prepublishing it and just work on the book.’

KENAN KOCAK: To what extent do you use cultural symbolism? For ex- ample, in Pyongyang, you are obsessed with the tortoise and constantly show it to us, the one in the restaurant, in the aquarium. Although you don’t say anything about the tortoise, I know that it is a symbol for long life in Korean culture. Do you follow the ‘don’t tell only show’ style?

GUY DELISLE: Well, it is not necessary to tell if it is not . . . It was very present in our life because it was a big tortoise and it was in a very small aquarium. And every time we went to the restaurant we saw that tortoise. And you can feel sorry for that big thing being in an aquarium. And I remember one day I was drunk and I was looking at that aquar- ium. And yes, somehow it represented to me being trapped: somehow like that tortoise is trapped in the aquarium, just like the people in North Korea. They were trapped in that country. And there is no need to say it if you just feel it and if it is not felt well; it is OK too, because it is just a nice living animal in an aquarium. It is nice to draw. But if it can add to the, like, to underline between the lines, the stuff you just feel while you read the comic, well, then, it is good, yes.

KENAN KOCAK: And you wanted to show the contradiction because the tortoise is a symbol for long life, but it is trapped there. Interview with Guy Delisle 111

GUY DELISLE: No, I did not have that information. I know it means long life, but it did not work as a symbol for me. No. For me the symbol was to be trapped. Like a big animal trapped in a small aquarium. For me that was the feeling I had when I was there myself, being trapped there. And to some extent, of course, the whole country where you have the citizen trapped in that small country just like the tortoise.

KENAN KOCAK: I really like the scene in Pyongyang when you talk about the Turkish del- egates. Thanks to them you ate Figure 10: Pyongyang Tortoise. Guy Delisle, better food in the restaurant! Pyongyang (Paris: L’Association, 2003), 35. GUY DELISLE: I remember that guy. He was quite big with a mous- tache. Oh, very Turkish. And I remember that one day he was talking to – I did not put it into the book – he was talking to the guy who was preparing the food and obviously he was not very happy with the food, but he was very diplomatic. But I think he went in the kitchen to show or to see how they were preparing such disgusting food somehow, and yes, I thought it was very cute. He was trying to have a good meal. But that is not likely to happen [there]!

KENAN KOCAK: And until the day I fi nished Pyongyang, I didn’t know that Turkey has diplomatic ties with North Korea.

GUY DELISLE: Yes, a few countries. There are still quite a few coun- tries which have diplomatic ties.

KENAN KOCAK: Everybody knows your love for Tintin. Have you ever taken any inspiration from Hergé? I think your style follows that of Hergé closely. What do you think about that? 112 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

GUY DELISLE: For me, it was when I arrived in Hong Kong, I spent a few weekends in Hong Kong, I was really seeing the Hergé way of describing China, because in some of his books you have all these very typical scenes on the street with lots of Chinese people. I did not get that so much in Shenzhen. But when I was in Hong Kong, yes, I really felt that I was in a Tintin book somehow. It was China a bit like you imagined. I remember when I was drawing it just happened that I had a little frame [of a Tintin album], and I have that image in a frame, and I was looking at it in China and I felt, yeah, that was how I felt when I was in Hong Kong. So I took it and I just retraced it. And I have put it in the book.

KENAN KOCAK: It is going to be very hard to ask, to answer, actually, but which of your books do you like the most?

GUY DELISLE: Well, I think Pyongyang, because I like the narration of it. I really like the ending of the book, with the airplane, paper air- plane. And that country was so special, and I was in a situation where you could only do that with a comic book. You know, no matter how big a team or camera you could have, they would have never worked in North Korea. So I was in a situation and had a perfect time, had just the perfect cover working there, and for me this book is a bit special. In the other ones I could establish the way you tell a story, the narration. I really like Jerusalem, but I guess Pyongyang was after Shenzhen, with more on the funny side, with some jokes. In Pyongyang I could show that you can actually have fun, but kind of, because it is not so much fun at the end of the book . . . And you can put in some information, you can learn about a country, and some journalistic aspects. For all these reasons, for me, yes, it is a special book.

KENAN KOCAK: As far as I know, on the Amazon U.K. website, they put Pyongyang in the Korean politics section, not in the comics section.

GUY DELISLE: Ahh, really? Thank you. I remember when that book was reviewed by some like Foreign Policy magazine in which they had never talked about comics before. The interesting thing is they were talking about the book regarding the info you get from the book, and not because it was a comic. It was interesting to see a comic book talking about North Korea. But they were actually talking about what was inside the comic book. So, I thought, ‘Wow, that is interesting.’ Interview with Guy Delisle 113

Figure 11: Hergé in Shenzhen. Guy Delisle, Shenzhen (Paris: L’Association, 2000), n.p.

KENAN KOCAK: As far as I know, none of your works has been trans- lated into Turkish. Could you suggest how one might go about trans- lating your works into Turkish? For instance, does one need to get in touch with your agency, or just yourself? 114 GUY DELISLE AND KENAN KOCAK

GUY DELISLE: First, you would need to fi nd a publishing house in Turkey. And they would contact my publishing house in France. And they would work out a deal. And then you could translate it, but you would need to fi nd a publishing house that does independent works, because these are different comic books. Do you have a lot of comic book translations in Turkey?

KENAN KOCAK: Yes, we have a very strong tradition.

GUY DELISLE: Oh, OK, I did not know that. So you have to fi nd a comic book publishing house that is doing like the new stuff that we have in France. And it is going to have to be able to attract the public that is interested in comics not for children, alternative comics. And then they can buy the rights easily from my publishing house. But if you just translate it and you do not get it published afterwards, it would be too bad to do all that work, I think. So, make sure you can fi nd a publishing house that my books would fi t in. If they exist, I am sure they have heard about the books, because I get a lot of translations and, yes, I even have a book in Croatian, translated recently.

KENAN KOCAK: Do you want to add anything else? Do you have any additional comments?

GUY DELISLE: I think we have covered quite a lot. No, I don’t see any- thing else.

KENAN KOCAK: Absolutely. We’ve spoken for at least fi fty-fi ve min- utes, because I am recording this interview. Thank you!

KENAN KOCAK: Thank you!

GUY DELISLE: It’s a pleasure! You are welcome. I remember one word in Turkish. It’s tes¸ekkür.

KENAN KOCAK: Tes¸ekkür, yes, thanks!

GUY DELISLE: Yeah, that’s all I remember.

Kenan Kocak is currently completing his PhD at the University of Glasgow. His work centres on comics journalism, with particular refer- ence to Joe Sacco, Guy Delis le and Kemal Gökhan Gürses. Over Under Sideways Down An Interview with Karrie Fransman

Ann Miller

Abstract In this interview Karrie Fransman discusses some of the aesthetic choices that she made in creating her comic book Over Under Sideways Down, the story of a young asylum seeker, which deals with a series of harrowing events: exile, journey and displacement, and then the struggle to attain the right to remain in the UK. Fransman considers the ethical and artistic issues raised by the telling of Ebrahim’s story, which includes episodes of pain and loss and which, moreover, he had already recounted many times over to disbelieving interviewers, who had the power to grant or refuse him refugee status. Fransman expresses her pleasure in discovering that the rendering of his story into comics form has helped Ebrahim to feel that he has gained control over it. She reflects on the process of condensing the narrative and heightening key moments, her concern to avoid turning violence into spec- tacle, and her use of resources of the medium, such as symbolism and me- tonymy, to convey the intensity of emotion. Keywords: asylum seeker, Karrie Fransman, Guardian, Red Cross

A Brief Introduction to Karrie Fransman and Her Work Karrie Fransman’s autobiographical comic strips are well-known to readers of the Guardian and many other daily and weekly newspapers, and the critical acclaim that greeted her fictional graphic novel The House That Groaned on its publication in 2012 brought her work to the attention of a wider public.1 Her comic book Over Under Sideways Down was commissioned by the British Red Cross as part of Refugee Week in June 2014. It tells the story of asylum seeker Ebrahim, who

1 Karrie Fransman, The House That Groaned (London: Square Peg, 2012).

European Comic Art Volume 8 Number 1, Spring 2015: 15–24 doi:10.3167/eca.2015.080103 ISSN 1754–3797 (Print), ISSN 1754–3800 (Online) 16 ann miller also featured in the film Leave to Remain (Bruce Goodison, 2013). Over Under Sideways Down won a Broken Frontier Award in the ‘Best One- Shot’ category in January 2015. It can be read on the British Red Cross website at http://webapps.redcross.org.uk/RefugeeWeekComic/.

Miller: Can we start with the title? The words Over Under Sideways Down guarantee that that refrain ‘When will it end?’ from the Yard- birds song will keep running through our heads as we read the book, so you’ve given it a kind of additional sound track. Could you comment on the choice of title?

Fransman: It’s a fantastic title and I’d love to claim it as my own idea, but it was Bryan Meredith at the Red Cross who came up with it once I’d finished the comic. It captures the many directions Ebrahim was pulled as he took his journey to the UK.

Miller: Your previous book, The House That Groaned, raised social is- sues but in the format of a work of fiction. How different is it to be starting from a factual story?

Fransman: I started my comic career with autobiographical comic strips in the Guardian and then moved away from that into the less exposing realm of fiction in The House That Groaned and other comics. I love fiction. It can be the perfect vehicle for getting people to think imaginatively and empathetically about a range of ‘issues’ in a more subtle and often personal manner. I’ve published a handful of report- age comics for newspapers and am always aware of the uncomfortable power you wield in telling someone else’s story and shoving them into the limelight. This was even more so the case with Ebrahim, who was letting us share an incredibly personal story of one young refugee, a story that we were using to gain awareness for the one thousand refu- gees under eighteen who arrive in the UK alone each year having fled violence and persecution.

Miller: Can you explain the involvement of the British Red Cross in the production of the book? Did they give you any specific guidance?

Fransman: It was the wonderful Rosie Stewart at the Red Cross who dreamed up this idea and walked into the comic book shop Gosh (1 Berwick Street in London) and asked for some names of comics artists An Interview with Karrie Fransman 17 who’d be able to do this project. I was lucky enough to be on the list. It delights me to know that amazing big-name charities such as the British Red Cross are harnessing the powers of the comics medium in telling these kinds of stories. They gave me some useful guidance but allowed me a lot of creative freedom.

Miller: Why was Ebrahim, in particular, chosen?

Fransman: The British Red Cross was aware that we needed to be par- ticularly sensitive in finding a young refugee who was able and willing to share their story. They vetted a couple of candidates and I inter- viewed two who were accompanied by their fantastic Red Cross case- worker, who ensured they were comfortable. Ebrahim was the perfect choice, as he had some experience of sharing his story in the press, as he’d been involved with an amazing movie, Leave to Remain by BAFTA winner Bruce Goodison. Though to be honest, I wish I could have told more refugees’ stories. Each one was so personal and incredible to hear.

Miller: His story has certain particularities: the specific circumstances that drove him to leave Iran, for example, but it also includes elements that are common to many asylum seekers. Was there a process of elim- ination of some details that would have been less generalisable?

Fransman: Not really. We wanted to honestly reflect Ebrahim’s story and hoped that people would be able to relate with his journey from all sides – from refugees to the Home Office and people in the UK. The British Red Cross helps over ten thousand refugees each year, and realises the importance of giving a voice to these people. I have always believed that the medium of comics is incredibly empathetic. The sim- plicity of the drawings helps people to project their own lives onto the characters, so I had no doubt the medium itself would make people relate to his story. There was one incident in particular when a refugee approached the Red Cross during a workshop and said, ‘This is my story.’ I was really touched to hear that, and knew the comic had served its purpose.

Miller: There must have been a process of shaping the story into a nar- rative: were there certain elements that you had to leave out because they detracted from the coherence of the story? 18 ann miller

Fransman: The comic was certainly a lot longer than I expected, as I found it so difficult to leave elements out. Naturally we had to be a bit sensitive about the political details of Ebrahim’s childhood in Iran to protect him and his family and not to show any political bias from the Red Cross. As for the process itself, I started transcribing my interview with Ebrahim and then scamped up a rough comic based on how I thought the narrative should flow. Following discussions with the Red Cross and Ebrahim we edited it. From my experience, creating comics is all about the editing – fitting bits in and chucking a whole lot out. Simplicity is key and allows you to have more room for creativity.

Miller: Can you tell us about the process of working with Ebrahim? Some of the events described are very harrowing, and must have been difficult for him to speak of. How did you overcome that? What input did he have into the images? Did you show him the artwork as you were going along?

Fransman: Yes. The story was very harrowing to hear. Myself and Vale- ria, Ebrahim’s Red Cross caseworker, had tears in our eyes during the interview, and Ebrahim himself looked exhausted when relaying them. But mostly I was so in awe of Ebrahim’s bravery as a young teenager in these circumstances and I felt enormous pressure to do his story justice. We got together for an intensive interview and then I went away and did a rough drawing of the comic. We reviewed with Ebrahim and the team at the Red Cross a number of times. In an ideal world, if time restrictions had not applied, I would have loved to sit down with Ebra- him to plot the whole comic out from his memory. But then it would have been a very different project. Funnily enough, after the comic was finished Ebrahim pointed out so many parts that he said were uncan- nily like his memories – sitting in the boxes in the back of the van and in the prison cell. But one makes so many assumptions when drawing a comic – I drew him with a backpack, but he’s not sure he even took one with him when he left Iran. However, I think it meant so much for him to have a documentation of his experiences told in this way. He felt ownership of that story, rather than the repeated ones he told as evidence to the Home Office and in courts of law.

Miller: Ebrahim sometimes speaks directly through speech balloons, or through words in inverted commas, but his story is mostly told through a third-person narrative voice. This alternation of voices works An Interview with Karrie Fransman 19 very well. How did you arrive at it? Did you consider making the whole thing a first-person account?

Fransman: I think a first-person account would have been very power- ful. But it is much harder work for the storyteller to weave an autobi- ographical account into a narrative arc.

Miller: I saw Leave to Remain, the film about teenage asylum seekers that Ebrahim acted in, and I thought it was very impressive. But your comic is more affecting, perhaps because of the mixture of realism and metaphor: the image of Ebrahim linked to his mother by tasbih beads, for example, is extraordinary (Fig. 1). Can you describe the process of arriving at metaphor like that?

Fransman: I saw Leave to Remain also and loved it. I suppose the com- ics medium is very different to film, as it easily allows you to approach factual stories with an air of magical realism. There are infinite possi- bilities for the scenery, lighting, styles, words and characters you ‘cast’ in your comics, so every choice is symbolic, be it on a conscious or

Figure 1: Realism and metaphor: the tasbih beads; horror that breaks the frame 20 ann miller unconscious level. So there are so many levels of meaning to the story- telling in comics. I guess at first I struggled with this potential when telling Ebrahim’s story. I could see the poetry and pain of the odyssey he had embarked on, but was at first unsure of how much of my imagination I should project onto his story. The image of the tasbih beads seemed to me like an umbilical cord linking him with his mother. The fact that he wore these to our interview and that they were the only object he had left of his mother was so moving and struck me as a visual symbol.

Miller: It also makes brilliant use of metonymy: the economical way in which you use images in speech balloons to condense the lengthy explanations that Ebrahim was forced to go through is a great exploita- tion of the resources of comics (Fig. 2). Did it immediately occur to you that this was the way to handle the interview scenes, or did you pare it down from something more wordy?

Fransman: When I first met Ebrahim I was at pains to explain that we would go slowly with the interview and he could omit anything he was

Figure 2: Exploitation of the resources of the medium An Interview with Karrie Fransman 21 not comfortable with answering. He looked at me wearily and told me he’d told this story thirty times or more to policemen, solicitors and lawyers. He had an exhaustion about him as he relayed the events. In a sense I was trying to do the reverse of that sequence in drawing the comic – to turn what had become evidence back into a meaningful and emotive story that he could feel ownership over. I love that comics allow you to play with semiotics and symbols.

Miller: The rendering of this story not only into images but also into sequences laid out across a page is highly complex. I’m thinking, for example, of the eleventh page. The sense of relentless movement, the sudden eruption of violence and the shocking event that comes at the end of the three-panel sequence, in which the final image breaks the frame, conveys the terror that Ebrahim felt – and the gradual focus in on his bowed head, in the tier below, is eloquent (Fig. 2). You obviously had to grapple with the issue of how to portray scenes of horror. Can you talk about the decisions that you made?

Fransman: Yes – it was heartbreaking to draw, and I struggled with those choices. Although they were just ink lines on paper, these were symbolic of real people – real refugees being beaten and real women raped by the human traffickers in front of their children. It’s incredi- bly difficult in choosing how to draw this. All of the creator’s choices in a comic are laid bare, and I feel you can so easily spot when an artist has enjoyed creating violent or sexual images (I’m thinking in particular of the sexualised and beautiful bodies of the rape victims in Craig Thompson’s Habibi). I chose to illustrate the refugees in the first two panels as depersonalised silhouettes and then to break out of this comfortable distance in the third panel with the emphasis on the wom- an’s face – contorting it into a frightened caricature. The red splashes helped to make the violence more real. The trauma and vulnerability of these refugees at the hands of these inhumane traffickers was horrific to hear about. One of the refugees I interviewed said he suffered from nightmares once he’d arrived in the UK – imagining all the children he’d seen during his journey and fearing what had become of them.

Miller: There has been quite a lot written about the question of national identity in comics. This is a comic that shows the loss of that identity: a blurred image in a trough of water, a sense of falling through space (Fig. 3). At the end, there is a beautiful page where the London skyline 22 ann miller

Figure 3: The loss of identity and place appears on a bridge above the mountains and lands that Ebrahim has traversed. Could you comment on that page in particular, but also more generally on the challenges posed by portraying a story of loss, disloca- tion and dispossession?

Fransman: I suppose the comics medium is perfect for exploring the identity of physical space as stories unfold across physical pages. Also, the language of comics crosses global boundaries, as it allows people to show their story to others from all over the world. So it is indeed a fantastic medium for exploring national identities. The comic was orig- inally created as an infinite canvas comic that would scroll downwards, and I tried to use images of movement – falling, running down the page – to emphasise this. The Red Cross wanted it also to be a book- let, but it is a shame the online version couldn’t use the infinite scroll, as some of that ‘journeying’ would have come across better. The final page with the London skyline and Ebrahim with his back to the hills was supposed to bring us back to the start of the story, where we had seen him with his journey ahead of him, then him looking back to Iran, An Interview with Karrie Fransman 23 where he had fled from. The final image shows him facing us with the hills and his journey behind him.

Miller: There’s a certain abstraction in the portrayal of place in Over Un- der Sideways Down, which conveys Ebrahim’s alienation from his sur- roundings. I’m thinking, in contrast, of those superbly detailed décors in The House That Groaned. Do you think that comics is a particularly apt medium for giving expression to a sense of place (or its absence)?

Fransman: [Laughs] Yes, also perhaps this is due to the way I con- structed Over Under Sideways Down – drawing ink scenes on paper without backgrounds, chopping them up and using the ink splodges and brush strokes to bring those drawings together. The House That Groaned very much explored the characters’ relationships to their phys- ical space – their rooms, the house and the panels. Sometimes they were very small and isolated in frames and at other times they are con- stricted by the panels. My new graphic novel, Death of the Artist (out in March 2015 with Jonathan Cape), looks at different spaces as seen through different characters’ eyes.

Miller: Could you say something about the colour palette? The use of shades of blue matches the tonality of the story, but were there other determinants on the decision to use a restricted range of colours?

Fransman: These were similar colours to The House That Groaned and perfect for the bleak story. But I think the ink textures gave the images more depth and movement.

Miller: The House That Groaned is remarkable for many qualities, in- cluding its humour. That would not have been appropriate in telling Ebrahim’s story, but could you imagine producing a political comic that would employ humour?

Fransman: There are so many amazing political satirists who do that so well, so I think I’ll leave that to the experts! Personally I hate having to be funny. I think The House That Groaned was very true to my own dark, sometimes grotesque and surreal brand of humour . . . which I’m not sure everyone shares! But it was also supposed to be a book that examines Western society’s anxious relationship with our own bodies – our fear of femininity, weight gain and loss, mortality and sexuality. 24 ann miller

So I guess it was a ‘political’ comic of sorts that employed ‘humour’ . . . of sorts!

Miller: Do you know what the readership of this comic is likely to be? It’s great that it’s distributed at showings of the film, but is there any way that it can be read by politicians who inflame prejudices around ‘asylum seekers’ as a vote-winning strategy, and by the people who might be tempted to vote for them?

Fransman: I think the target audience is manifold: residents in the UK who may not be aware of the negative image of refugees and asylum seekers in the mainstream media or that the UK hosts less than 1 per- cent of the world’s refugees, UKIP [UK Independence Party] support- ers, those in the Home Office who do not understand the pain of going through the asylum process, and other refugees who will hopefully be inspired to pick up pens and tell their own stories. I was delighted to hear that the comic had been spotted being read by Home Office dele- gates on a plane following a conference that the Red Cross attended, so it is reaching the right hands. It has also been passed around a fair bit on social media, tweeted about by Neil Gaiman, Simon Pegg and the Green MP Caroline Lucas, and used as a teaching resource in schools. I hope the comic continues its own journey and that a copy eventually falls into Nigel Farage’s hands. We can but dream!