When we tell him that this comic strip, where we discover with him the Crozet and Kerguelen archipelagos and the Amsterdam and Saint-Paul islands, is at the origin of many vocations among those who wanted to work in the French Southern Territories (Taaf), he replies that it does not belong to him.

Slender, well-trimmed gray beard, Emmanuel Lepage, 56, only knew the Kerguelen Islands before his comic strip for having "seen this Breton name on a map in the middle of nowhere".

He discovered the archipelago, beaten by the winds in the south of the Indian Ocean, during a trip in 2010. He then proposed to the Taaf administration to make it the heart of a comic strip "because 'it needed a guarantee of publication to get on board".

"I had never done documentary comics, I was more into fiction", he says, referring to his work on the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, "Muchacho", "Les voyages d'Ulysse" transposition of the Odyssey to the 19th century, his album on the Guarani Indians or the Névé series.

For this first trip to the Southern Territories, he witnessed the emotional lift experienced that year by the winter visitors who had spent more than a year in Crozet: they had been promised a last night on land, before canceling it. then restore it.

This gives him "the intuition of what life on the district should be like": "a community at the end of the world".

"It's not the animals and all the administrative stuff that makes the Taaf", realizes Emmanuel Lepage.

French Southern and Antarctic Lands © Valentin RAKOVSKY / AFP/Archives

This first trip "was a great adventure, but so was the book, because I worked backwards. Usually I start with the script, there I ended up with a hundred drawings and illustrations and I asked: +how do you tell a rotation?+".

Back in his studio, he mixed Indian ink sketches and watercolor illustrations made on site in a black and white album.

-Comics are a "companionship"-

"I don't have a journalistic approach, people talk to me and that gives me ideas. The things that nourish humanly, it happens at the table, at the bar (...) I recreate the situations, it's the advantage of comics", he explains.

Emmanuel Lepage was trained as a teenager by Jean-Claude Fournier, one of the authors of Spirou, himself trained by André Franquin, the "father" of Gaston Lagaffe.

"Comic strips are companionship," he says.

Since his first album on the Taaf, Emmanuel Lepage has made another on a mission in Antarctica, "The moon is white", and he is the first comic book author appointed official painter of the Navy at the end of 2021.

French artist Emmanuel Lepage paints Saint-Paul Island (in the background), in Antarctica, from the deck of the supply boat Marion Dufresne, December 28, 2022 © PATRICK HERTZOG / AFP

The "conscientious objector" that he is even received "a lieutenant's uniform", he laughs.

But persisted "this frustration of not having lived this daily life" on one of the southern islands.

"People have the impression of a more real life here. It begs the question + what is real life? +".

He was working on a comic strip project on Kerguelen when the journalist François Picard contacted him to offer to follow him for a month in Kerguelen at the end of 2022 to make a documentary for Arte.

"I had a lot of moments of complicity, of intimacy with each other. They tamed each other. It went very well", says Emmanuel Lepage.

His sketchbooks and watercolors have not left him.

His comic strip project on the Kerguelens still needs a common thread.

"I like this part of improvisation: there is a book somewhere, but I don't know which one yet. Throwing yourself into the void, I actually like that".

© 2023 AFP