Comics: in Toulouse and Colomiers, Blutch will enchant you with his new album, “La mer à potable”
Blutch will be in Toulouse on Friday November 18, at the BD Fugue bookshop, then at the Colomiers comic book festival this weekend to sign his new album, the strange and bewitching “La mer à drunk”. He evokes this “erotic romance”, a funny waking dream of great beauty.
It’s a curious story that Blutch tells us in “La mer à potable”. It is about a woman; named A, and of a man, who calls himself B (and then also Hope-of-the-Evening and Glory-to-the-Vainqueur). B is crazy about A and will do everything to win her over. It begins as a western, continues in the register of erotic comedy and takes many other side roads. A real waking dream, of great plastic beauty, which captivates the senses and stimulates the imagination.
Right from the start of “La mer à bouche”, where Brussels appears on the edge of a mountain lake, you ensure that the reader loses all his bearings…
With each book, I try to step aside, to surprise myself before surprising the reader. I’m so afraid of falling into a routine! This is also the case formally: I like using new techniques, changing instruments. The idea of Brussels in the mountains comes from my eldest son. He was 7 or 8 years old when I took him there by train. When we arrived at the Gare du Midi, he said to me: “So, is Switzerland like that?” This child’s word has remained in my memory to the point of inspiring me 15 years later. The starting point is surprising, yes, but I think my job as an author and designer is to make people admit the unthinkable, pure unreason.
The flyleaf only comes towards the end of the book, like a new beginning. Why ?
If it only includes me, I would have deleted it completely! But it is mandatory to indicate the different credits. I wanted to start the story directly (with a steam train rolling down the mountainside, editor’s note), as if the story had already started and the reader was breaking into it.
The sequel can be described as playful as long as you take us into a world that plays with surprises…
Rather than playful, I would say humorous. I cut my teeth at Fluide Glacial, Gotlib’s magazine. I still consider myself a humorist. I like to put derision, distance even in sentimental or surreal stories. The idea is to take the reader by the hand and not let go, to lead him on quicksand.
Why do you think by a western?
I use the references known to all: cowboys, Indians; the adventure, the quest, while perverting them. The opening of the book is from the early Hergé, leaping, like “Tintin in America”, which I quote abundantly, in all humility.
The album is subtitled “romance”. However, we are not far from a Hollywood bluette…
This word sums up the story well, which aims to make a man and a woman meet, despite all the pitfalls, like in a film that I love, “Her and Him”, by Leo McCarey. To do this, I drew an almost geometric line so that B, which always goes to the right, ends up joining A, which always goes to the left. I tell the beginnings of a love, the rise of desire.
A desire that materializes in numerous fairly explicit nude scenes…
I wanted to make a fairly sensual book, on all levels and on all grounds. There is the man, the woman, a red lasso metaphor of the first desire but also flowers and a very precise choice of colors. This is the first time that I have completely colored an album. I took great pleasure in it, whereas writing and drawing can be painful.
In Toulouse and Colomiers, you will meet passionate readers. How do you live these signatures?
Alright. After two and a half years of “weaning”, I am happy to find readers, to see how they welcome this new book. I too am a passionate, bibliophile, obsessed with comics. I understand them so well, these readers: I am their brother.
“I remember Nougaro’s funeral”
A native of Strasbourg, Blutch then lived in Paris, in Port-Vendres… then in Toulouse, from 2000 to 2006. rise of telework, says the designer. I’m quite solitary, I’ve always stayed away from gangs, never at ease in workshops or incorporated companies. The major memory of my stay in Toulouse is Claude Nougaro’s funeral in Saint-Sernin (in March 2004, editor’s note). The weather was fine, my windows were open; there was such an impressive silence in the city that I could hear mass from my house. »