De Pilote à Poisson Pilote I
Feb. 11th, 2006 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOne strand of the Angoulême Festival was entitled De Pilote à Poisson Pilote: linking the generation of comics creators who emerged through Pilote magazine to their successors, featured in the Poisson Pilote collections, the up-and-coming and the new stars. For the best part of a year in the early seventies, when I lived in Versailles, Pilote brightened my Tuesdays, with the latest installment of Astérix, Blueberry, Gotlib's Rubrique-&qgrave;-Brac, Le Vaisseau de Pierre (The Stone Ship, an extraordinary tale of town-planning and the supernatural by Bilal and Christin), maybe an installment of Fred's Philémon, or one of Patrice Leconte's quirky narratives. What better guide to further reading than an exhibition pairing these heroes of my golden age with the best of the contemporary scene?
Well, maybe seeing these couples in conversation on-stage: down in the basement of the theatre, which has the virtue of being an intimate venue, and the corresponding fault that the event was not amplified, and the conversation informal to the verge of inaudibility, which made it particularly challenging for the non-native speaker.
On the first afternoon, the older generation was represented by Fred: soft-spoken, discursive, always interesting but hard to pin down - much like his work, which has a surreal, dream-like quality: one of the first French comics I ever read had Fred's hero, Philémon lost on the A of "Atlantic Ocean".
Joann Sfar's best-known work, Le Chat du rabbin, concerns a cat who learns to talk, follows in the same tradition: he was more outgoing on stage, projected more, engaged more directly with the questions asked, and his replies were full of quotable lines. Speaking of Hergé, for example, whose work he admired without fealing personally drawn to it, he described him as "le Buster Keaton de la BD".
He quoted a friend as saying that our great debt to the Arab world was not mathematics at all, but the feuilleton, the continuing story or soap opera. We writers, he said, are like Sheherazade, who saved her life by spinning out her story: when I am working on a story, "j'ai l'impression de gagner ma vie", not just earning a living in the financial sense, but earning the right to live.
Fred was less quotable, although there was one question to which he did give a succinct answer: asked whether he would allow someone else to continue the adventures of Philémon, he replied with a startled "Non."
Well, maybe seeing these couples in conversation on-stage: down in the basement of the theatre, which has the virtue of being an intimate venue, and the corresponding fault that the event was not amplified, and the conversation informal to the verge of inaudibility, which made it particularly challenging for the non-native speaker.
On the first afternoon, the older generation was represented by Fred: soft-spoken, discursive, always interesting but hard to pin down - much like his work, which has a surreal, dream-like quality: one of the first French comics I ever read had Fred's hero, Philémon lost on the A of "Atlantic Ocean".
Joann Sfar's best-known work, Le Chat du rabbin, concerns a cat who learns to talk, follows in the same tradition: he was more outgoing on stage, projected more, engaged more directly with the questions asked, and his replies were full of quotable lines. Speaking of Hergé, for example, whose work he admired without fealing personally drawn to it, he described him as "le Buster Keaton de la BD".
He quoted a friend as saying that our great debt to the Arab world was not mathematics at all, but the feuilleton, the continuing story or soap opera. We writers, he said, are like Sheherazade, who saved her life by spinning out her story: when I am working on a story, "j'ai l'impression de gagner ma vie", not just earning a living in the financial sense, but earning the right to live.
Fred was less quotable, although there was one question to which he did give a succinct answer: asked whether he would allow someone else to continue the adventures of Philémon, he replied with a startled "Non."
