Hello ladies and gentlemen Oh! Sorry gentlemen! In his soft voice, Efix hastens to reassure the confused old lady of her contempt: It’s okay, I’m used to it And then, with the mask, eh Strolling with Efix and his long mane in the wind (well, when it’s windy) allows you to confirm two of his character traits underlined by Mathieu Diez, the director of the Lyon BD Festival: benevolence He’s one of the most inherently nice guys in the noblest sense of the word I’ve met in 15 years. and volubility Cevery time he writes, I have to block half an hour because he cannot send an email of less than 2000 characters, even to just say hello, but I do it with pleasure because each time I immerse myself with his words in his mate and he makes me laugh like no one else. Let us go beyond human qualities. Illustrator Sandrine Deloffre sees in him the BG of 9e art, a person so talented, so kind and so cool that it makes me heart beat. His former workshop neighbor at KCS, B-Gnet, is no less logical: KCS, it was called “the trailing table”, because of its precision. Otherwise, I like to talk with him, he has a great listening (and speaking) quality, without judgment. Such unanimity encourages us to go further, to trace the thread of the prolific career of Defix. Not to unearth some shameful secret but to bring together the pieces of a vast artistic puzzle on the eve of his multi-media journey (exhibitions, interventions, shows etc.) Givors at the beginning of February. Especially since for the illustrator, 2020 will have been ambivalent, as fruitful as it is painful. Efix indeed underwent at the summer solstice the mourning of a friend of always, his quasi brother and coscnarist Cric. Lanne, however, got on well, with the publication on Bamboo of With or without a mustache?, scnaris by Courty. If the spring confinement that followed “benefited” her next album, The House saw (written by Blanche Lancezeur and published by Fls at the end of summer), the pandemic was not without damage, earning him his biggest unpaid since he became independent, planted by a theater itself planted . But Efix puts it into perspective: he is currently receiving a lot of proposals for interventions drawn “in video” from com boxes or from events forced to reinvent himself, which he finds stimulating. a reminds me of my beginnings in the 1990s: at the time, we announced a maddening peak of crisis, and it is there that we had our best years A famous success, even, which made him the king of Grenoble oil, before he dared to devote himself to his true passion: comics.
Things were, however, badly off to little Franois-Xavier. Lille (by birth), arrived in Isre very young, he shines at school, but by his mediocre absolute dunce . In the courtyard, however, his early talent for drawing earned him a certain aura. This good comrade, on the other hand, exceeds the atmosphere of the football locker room, prefiguring the competitive side of the world in which we live. 16 years old he left his province of Aznavour, determined to take life. Lastly, above all, to learn a trade. But after three years, to do a little of everything and temporarily (from insulation to the assembly of stands, including the dismantling of defective machines in the mass mon job prfr , he fell back on Grenoble. Stroke of luck: with two friends, they have the opportunity to set up a graphic design company around a big inaugural contract for a paint brand. The adventure will last ten years, intense and profitable, driven by institutional ads and commercial catalogs. The box grows, will have up to three additional employees and move Gires. The creative rubs the entire chain of publishing, crashes all the techniques but begins to chomp. Dawn of his thirties, Efix is eyeing other universes and no longer sees himself making wafers for sausage or chocolate. If he had sent Glacial Fluid boards in the past, the kind refusals of Gotlib and Jacques Diament were then accompanied by an incentive to work more; Now that he knows how to work, why not try his luck again?
Like a boomerang
In 1996, Efix therefore set up his account without getting angry with his associates, obviously to have time to devote his personal projects and choose his orders. Among these: redesigning a young, booming local newspaper, The Little Bulletin, of which he notably energizes the logo. Will you be amazed if the leaders remember a guy adorable, kind, etc. ? In parallel, he attacks his first comic book opus, My friend the Poof, Volume 1: Moorad. A pav in black and white self-described in 1999, between thriller, parody and social chronicle where we discover the seeds of a wide and round style, reminiscent in the form of the Dany of the great era, but with more audacity, as well as a sense of stunning graphic space. the opportunity for an exhibition in Grenoble logically bringing together the entire circle of people in Efix, that is to say all the gratin Dauphinois, the local press (France 3, M6) is racing. Grannies who think that this is a regionalist author is dedicating the album They don’t have to buy volume 2 and Momie Folie sold the 1000 copies in a few weeks. This bookstore, co-founded by Christophe Salomon, alias Jack, will be a pillar for Efix. Soon joined by Exprience Lyon, where the illustrator migrated in 2000 to join his beautiful. 2000, it is also the number of copies which it reprints and which it distributes independently, the way of the zicos: Yes, booksellers liked a lot, a cingl who delivered five Lille albums with his 106 and whose motorway charges cost six times what he got from them. Encouraged, he saddles up in volume 2 and, at the same time, his buddy Jack (alias Flip) entrusts him with an intimate story which will lead to the cathartic K, a pretty count. Impressed, the Grenoblois Alfred puts them up against the wall: You’ve done yourself some good, but it has to live up to the editorial point of view! One thing leading to another, the story arrives in the hands of the publisher Olivier Petit (de Petit Petit) who agrees and asks if Efix has something else. My friend the Poof, precisely Petit is excited and made a solemn promise to bring the series to an end. It will have merit, because two and a half years will separate the fourth from the fifth and last volume , underlines Efix.
The second breath
With its artisanal dimension and its boss defending with teeth its authors, Petit Petit is the ideal “house” for Efix. His other “house” in Lyon, it was then the KCS workshop, a concentrate of talents to the square meter o (s) illustrate among others the Jouvray, Salsedo, B-Gnet, Sorrentino, Berquin, Ben LeBgue It is in this atmosphere as studious as good child that he will compose the title which will earn him his first national notority, Fuck factory, adaptation of the novel Jean-Pierre Levaray, then The Ghosts of the Old Town and Kill your boss with the same scriptwriter. The series will undergo an editorial waltz propelling Efix into a gigantic group, which has the effect of drowning it in a catalog as disproportionate as illegible: In my journey, the lights of potential resolution have systematically been , he laughs today. But the illustrator never stops working: a bio of Obama (2008) very remarkable, of the participations of the collectives. He also invests in the beginnings of the Lyon BD Festival which regularly programs various participations (exhibitions, shooting Fucking factory) and keep a foot (or a hand?) in the graphic design. By vital necessity: Comic book monomania, every time I tested it, it took me to deeper chasms Efix thus regularly signs posters, deviations designed for friends, logos. Like Cocteau, he is one of those rare artists whose handwriting is immediately identifiable as on the storefront of Mummy, obviously. There is an “Efix typo”, harmonious and inseparable from its line. And like any police, it is authoritative. Strangely, the editor Olivier Sulpice of Bamboo finds that it is his handicap. Would we dare to say that he is the only one?
My friend the master
Even if his years of study did not necessarily leave him with good memories, Efix ended up joining the school by the gang, the prodigy would have astonished the young Franois-Xavier. First by teaching for two years, before giving up for fear of routine and after having noticed how fast we take the habits and customs of the profession. He therefore swapped the teacher’s cap against that of a speaker for three years at the Lyce Professionnel Tony-Garnier in Bron. It all started when the establishment’s documentalist approached her during the presentation of the Prix des Lycens et des Apprentis Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes 2017 for her album. 12 Rue Royale was a finalist. She had previously seen him draw live with a Brignais hip-hop dancer and felt that Fix was the right person to help him share the love of reading with a rather reluctant audience. Good pick: this book eater is won over by the idea of drawing the suggestions for students inspired by their reading, but also of seeing their drawings of neophytes. School year after school year, despite the pandemic and the masks, the stoffe project and more classes are participating. These few hours in the year are added to other meetings structuring the week of this pupil who, every Tuesday afternoon, leads another workshop with patients of the Vinatier. He is the one on the flipchart, responding to a sort of random brainstorming with regard to the context, the sessions being able to be serrated . I boast no challenges, do stunts like a cowboy in the most accidental places possible. In fact, I want to confront the world I live in, beyond what the news reports. For example, these same women who are said to be always glued to their cellphones, well, they’re still in love, they have the same school mess as I did back then. Still, we have to get them to admit that it’s not shameful to read comics beyond 12 years: It put me on the ass to find in the mouths of 17 year old guys what my grandfather said in 1896 But as always, Efix remains a philosopher: One day when I was reproducing a work by Rodin at the Muse des Beaux-Arts for Lyon BD, a little old woman said to me: “Ah but in fact you draw almost as well as the ones shown here“. We must not despair. This bulimic cinphile is even capable of seeing old French films from the 1970s and 1980s again to give Michel Constantin a chance to play better and Alain Delon to be less macho, that is to say
EFIX Givors
– Comic strip club at Paul-Vallon College: from 12:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday March 4 (making a strip).
– Comic strip workshops on Max-Pol Fouchet media: from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., then from 2.30 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesdays February 10 and 17, and from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Saturdays 13 and 20.
– Interventions at the Paul-Vallo college around the creation process (search for a character, scenario, storyboard then production of at least one page on themes chosen by the teachers and classes of 4e SEGPA): from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday February 25, Tuesday 2 (from 10 a.m. to noon to confirm), Thursday March 11 and 18, Thursday 1is, April 8 and 29 and Thursday May 6 and 13.
– Half-page graphic design each month in the city newspaper from February July-August.
– Expo la Mostra: from June 6 to early July (with the postponement of Relire le monde canceled in January).
– Fucking factory, the spectacle of the Improvement: two performances (including a school) on March 26 at the theater with “drawing in life”.
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