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Jose Maria Robles Madrid
Madrid
Updated Thursday, March 7, 2024-00:08
They had told us that to make an omelette it is essential to break eggs.
Then you had to beat them this way or that.
That it would be much tastier if we added such and that we would burn in hell if we added Pascual.
Until
Ferran Adrià
appeared with his deconstructed tortilla and made a mess of conventions.
"
To be innovative is to seek to be skillful
," the chef stressed at his peak of popularity, when he took three basic ingredients of Spanish gastronomy, combined them and arranged them like no one had done before: in a liquid dish that is served in a glass and eat with a spoon
Well, graphic designer and cartoonist
Martin Panchaud
had to arrive to demonstrate that making comics does not have to be exactly the same as preparing an old-fashioned omelet.
That the equivalent of the mixture of potatoes, egg and oil in the ninth art still admits unusual reinterpretations.
In short, the graphic novel canon can be given a good siphoning.
"
They often tell me that what I do is neither exactly a drawing nor a comic
. Even authors who love the line with whom I agree at festivals tell me this. I answer yes, although it is true that what I do questions the which is a comic, necessarily understood only as characters, settings and nothing more," explains the author via video call.
"For a long time they also told me that what I do is experimental... and that no one was going to like it. In fact, even
my first editor confessed to me: 'I believe absolutely nothing in this project. We are not going to sell or a copy
, but since it is something new we are going to publish it.' And now he is delighted, of course."
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"There are people who are taking advantage of the end of the world"
Panchaud (Geneva, 42 years old) these days presents the Spanish edition of
The Color of Things
(Reservoir Books), his late but brilliant debut as a cartoonist and the work with which
he won the Fauve d'Or at the Festival de Angoulême and the Grand Prix de la Critique ACBD
.
Or what is the same, the two biggest prizes in the main European cartoon market.
Before him he had already devastated Switzerland and Germany.
And now he is going down the same path in Spain and Italy.
Thanks to?
Basically, his
talent as a visual storyteller
.
Panchaud presents his story with a
minimalist graphic style
that not only dispenses with traditional vignette sequencing, but even
turns the characters into geometric figures
.
In this case, colorful circles similar to casino chips.
Thus, a child appears as a small sphere, an old man is a circle with a deformed edge, and a dog has an elongated sausage shape.
Panchaud also places his characters in environments that are reminiscent of Google's urban plans, the rooms of the video game
The Sims , and the infographics of
National Geographic
magazine
.
The result: an
immersive experience that knocks you out from the first glance
and that, through iconography and abstraction, appeals more directly than if the author offered it well crushed.
"Since I work with computer tools, I thought: I design a set, place the characters and I just have to copy and paste. It will be easy and fast. And not at all!
Working like this requires a lot of time, so what I thought was "A virtue became a kind of trap
," jokes the cartoonist when asked about the advantages and disadvantages of such a synthetic narrative.
"What I do like is looking for solutions," he adds.
"Sometimes I have to draw a scene - for example, a character who steals a gun - and I can't see in other books how my colleagues have solved it, but I have to invent the way to do it myself. Surely this is the most delicate and also the most fun.
For the reader, I think that by not seeing the face or body of the characters it is up to him to give them life, and that perhaps generates a more intimate relationship with the comic
. I like to think that he "It allows us to have a unique relationship with the story. The role of an author is to play with the reader's imagination and make it work."
In 2016, Panchaud had hinted at his talent and his potential to become a reference storyteller in our era saturated with images.
He then dared to convert the film
Star Wars IV: A New Hope
- the first of the original trilogy - into a virtuoso
123-meter-long web infographic
that reproduced the original dialogues from George Lucas' film.
And where all the characters were, of course, geometric shapes: Darth Vader, a black pentagon;
R2-D2, a little blue dot...
The Swiss reread the science fiction classic with his own codes and from his condition as a
former dyslexic
.
Because, and now it's time to clarify, his
style of visual narrator is not the epathetic and vacuous acrobatics of someone with many hours in front of a Mac
, but the resource of someone who, as a young man, had had real problems relating to his environment through language. written.
"For a long time I wanted to decode words and instead of writing the word cat, for example, I would say: 'This shape will represent cat for me.' I have always wanted to tell stories and create worlds.
The world of text was a bit forbidden to me, while the comic offered me freedom, a universe in which I could use whatever I wanted
," he explains about a complicated stage.
To the point that dyslexia prevented him from pursuing higher education first and placing the interpretation of shapes and their meanings at the center of his research later, when he enrolled at the EPAC school.
Then came the artistic residencies in London (Barbican Centre) and Athens (Onassis Stegi), the comic adaptation of
Star Wars
and
The Color of Things
.
"I wondered if everyone would be able to understand what I wanted to tell. I made a short black-and-white comic with an art collective that was even more schematic. I showed it to my family, who normally doesn't read comics, and
they told me of the story and the characters naturally, without it having seemed strange to them that one circle spoke to another
", he remembers his beginnings and his doubts.
"That's when I saw that there was a thread there that could be pulled."
The color of things
, in any case, is much more than a visual trick.
The graphic novel that has catapulted Panchaud as a Central European disciple of avant-garde comic masters such as
Chris Ware
(
Jimmy Corrigan
,
Rusty Brown
) or
Richard Maguire
(
Here
) and compadre of our longed-for
Calpurnio
(
The Big Book of Cuttlas
) is a
bradycardic
thriller
and hilarious.
Simon Hope - orange circle - is 14 years old, overweight, has an alcoholic father addicted to gambling and several bullies in his own neighborhood.
His destiny seems to change radically when he wins 16 million pounds in a horse race
.
And yet...
"I really like drama mixed with humor. That's why I return again and again to the films of the Coen brothers, which are very powerful when it comes to dialogue and staging. From Kurosawa I'm also interested in the silences, the turns...", says the author, a maniac of detail as only true geniuses are.
"For example, in the horse race I tried to be very rigorous. I looked up the names of the horses, the jockeys... I also had a long conversation with a scientist about whales," he comments in relation to the most mysterious character in his comic
How do you feel when you see that the world saturates our eyes every day with thousands of images?
How do you think such visual overload affects our brain and our understanding of the world?
Panchaud, who is
reinventing the graphic novel with codes similar to those in the instruction manuals of an appliance
, admits that when he seriously considered dedicating himself to making comics there was a kind of race towards hyperrealism and 3D spectacularization.
"This competition continues to be fought. We see it in the Marvel film
adaptations
, which do increasingly incredible things and try to expand the limits.
I with my circles, on the other hand, am doing the opposite
," the author of the superhero
blockbusters
.
And he concludes: "A person told me that his daughter is 14 years old and that he thought she would never be interested in a job like mine. But she has. I have also met people who have told me that they never read comics and that
The color of things
is the first that finishes. And that seems great to me."