Comics: in Toulouse and Colomiers, Blutch will enchant you with his new album, “La mer à potable”

It is a curious story that Blutch tells us in “La mer à potable”. She is a woman; she called A, and of a man, who calls himself B (and later also Hope-of-the-evening and Gloria-al-Vainqueur). B is crazy about A and will do anything to win her over. It starts out as a western, moves into the erotic comedy register, and takes many other byways. A real daydream, of great plastic beauty, which tickles the senses and stimulates the imagination.

From the very beginning of “La mer à bouche”, where Brussels appears on the shore of a mountain lake, you make the reader completely lose orientation…

With each book, I try to step aside, to surprise myself before surprising the reader. I’m so scared of falling into routine! This is also formally the case: I like to use new techniques, change tools. The idea of ​​Brussels in the mountains comes from my eldest son. He was 7 or 8 when I took him there by train. When we arrived at the Gare du Midi, he said to me: “So, is Switzerland like this?” This child’s word 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, the sheer unreasonableness.

The endpaper comes only towards the end of the book, like a new beginning. How come ?

If it were up to 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, ed), as if the story had already begun and the reader was breaking into it.

The sequel can be described as playful as it takes us into a world that plays with surprises…

Rather than playful, I would say humorous. I cut my teeth on 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 him go, to lead him on quicksand.

Why do you start with a western?

I use references known to all: cowboys, Indians; the adventure, the research, while perverting them. The opening of the book is from the first Hergé, leaping, like “Tintin in America”, which I quote profusely, in all humility.

The album is subtitled “Romance”. However, we are far from a Hollywood cornflower blue…

This word sums up the story well, which aims to bring together a man and a woman, despite all the pitfalls, as in a film that I adore, “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 story of the beginnings of a love affair, the rise of desire.

A desire that takes shape in numerous quite explicit nude scenes…

I wanted to make a fairly sensual book, on all levels and from all points of view. There is the man, the woman, a red lace metaphor of the first desire but also flowers and a precise choice of colours. This is the first time I have completely colored an album. I loved it, while writing and drawing can be painful.

In Toulouse and Colomiers you will meet passionate readers. How do you experience these signatures?

Very good. After two and a half years of “weaning”, I am happy to find readers again, to see how they welcome this new book. I too am a fan, bibliophile, obsessed with comics. I understand them so well, these readers: I am their brother.

“I Remember Nougaro’s Funeral”

Born in Strasbourg, Blutch then lived in Paris, in Port-Vendres… then in Toulouse, from 2000 to 2006. birth of teleworking, says the designer. I’m quite solitary, I’ve always stayed away from gangs, never comfortable in workshops or capital companies. The greatest memory of my stay in Toulouse is the funeral of Claude Nougaro in Saint-Sernin (in March 2004, ed). 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. »