Jean Graton, the French author who created the Michel Vaillant comic strip in the late 1950s, is buried on Wednesday January 27 in Brussels, a week after his death at the age of 97.
The series, which recounted the adventures of a racing driver, was available in 79 volumes with a total of some 25 million albums sold worldwide.
His son Philippe, who has been writing the scripts for Michel Vaillant for over 15 years, tells us how the saga, and his father, became cult.
Jean Graton, creator of Michel Vaillant, the most famous comic book pilot, is buried Wednesday in Brussels, a week after his death, at the age of 97.
The work he leaves behind is considerable, with more than 79 albums published and more than 25 million copies sold.
His son, Philippe, took over and for the past fifteen years has been signing the scenarios for other designers.
He confides in his father and his work with Europe 1.
Michel Vaillant is one of those exceptionally long-lived comics, like your father, who died in his 98th year. From 1994, you worked alongside him as a screenwriter. How did this collaboration come about?
1994 is the date on which, almost accidentally, I take over the writing of Michel Vaillant's scripts.
I was one of the first photojournalists to return to Vietnam in 1988, and from a subsequent report, around 1992, I had brought back lots of photos to my father suggesting that he set up an adventure in this fantastic country.
"Since you seem to know what you want to talk about, write the script," he told me.
La Piste de Jade
, Michel Vaillant's 57th adventure, was released in 1994 and received a warm welcome from the press and the public.
So I continued to write the following scripts, until relaunching the whole series in 2009 in a "new season".
I realize today that if I wanted to spend time with my father, I had to work with him, because work was his whole life.
I understand why my mother was her colorist!
Weren't you sometimes a little jealous of having to share your father with "his paper son"?
This is a relevant question because my father put his profession above all, sometimes even before his children with whom he hardly spent time.
This is the price to pay when a father is a great man, a scholar, a creator, a hero… A great man is often a father who is not very present.
My two brothers probably suffered more than me.
Together we scoured the rallies, and even deep Ireland for the album "Irish Coffee".
On the road, we were discussing scenario.
I probably learned part of the trade like that.
I think he liked making these trips with his son, that he was happy with these moments of complicity.
I suspect him to have chosen certain subjects just to do the scouting with me ... And then we took up a hell of a challenge with "Graton Editeur", the small independent label that we created together to self-publish and no longer depend on big publishers.
It was not a foregone conclusion.
Heard on europe1:
As a child, he took me with him on the circuits.
I photographed cars and drivers of course, but also fire extinguishers, gasoline cans, flags, tool drawers ... All the details necessary to make his drawings by Michel Vaillant realistic
Jean Graton was renowned for reproducing the details of cars with extreme thoroughness, down to the smallest bolt. Did you feel it in the daily work with him?
As a child, he took me with him on the circuits.
As soon as I started to get by in photography, around fifteen, he started to rely on me for his documentation.
I photographed cars and drivers of course, but also fire extinguishers, gasoline cans, flags, tool drawers… All the details necessary to make his drawings by Michel Vaillant realistic.
And comics or cinema, for a story to be credible, it must be realistic.
You can be daring in the scenarios, you have to be, but when it comes to technical plausibility, if you write or draw stuff that doesn't hold up, everything collapses and the viewer or reader leaves the story. .
This was the problem with the film
Michel Vaillant
by Luc Besson / Louis-Pascal Couvelaire.
Is there an album produced with you that your father was particularly proud of?
The Jade Trail
, because a script written by someone else had forced him to draw characters he never imagined.
He confessed to me that a designer who writes his own scenarios takes care to imagine only scenes that he will draw easily, without putting himself in danger.
In
La Piste de Jade
, my father must have drawn a mischievous old Vietnamese man, street kids in Saigon, in short, put himself in danger ... to realize that he was doing admirably!
The album was very successful and reached a wider audience.
My father was very proud of this.
"One day, Michel Vaillant gave me an invaluable gift: he opened the doors of motorsport to me. For this gift, I will remain eternally grateful to him", says Alain Prost in "Michel Vaillant, l'Aventure Automobile", biography of Jean Graton that you co-signed with Xavier Chimits. A tribute that shows how close your father was to the pilots. Did he still have relations with the younger generation?
Until the 90s, yes;
afterwards, I took over.
My sources were Nicolas Prost), Vanina Ickx, Manu Collard, Alain Menu, and then journalists like Lionel Froissart.
Because the world was changing, the pilots became less and less accessible, everything had to go through the press officers.
Gone are the big tables that my father had known, where the greatest pilots rubbed shoulders with journalists and told each other everything, most often laughing.
The interests at stake were no longer the same, and the pilots were becoming silent.
Heard on europe1:
While taking care of the old Michel Vaillant, we created a new one.
Nothing has been destroyed, nothing damaged;
we added new seasons and increased the work
When Jean stopped drawing, about fifteen years ago, you continued to write scenarios for other designers, and made the albums evolve towards a world less in the spirit of "Journal de Tintin", but in a more cruel world, even killing the hero's brother and throwing Michel in prison accused of being the murderer. What was Jean Graton's view on this evolution of the characters?
"Go ahead, dare, do things that I didn't dare to do!", My father told me.
He trusted me and knew why, I think.
The world had changed, but so had the readers.
It was no longer a question of inventing illustrated stories for children.
Today, the average age of the comic reader is forty.
This reader was educated by films and television series much less naive than those of the daddy's comics.
Even Batman, even James Bond had to evolve.
Michel Vaillant too.
I have been there sometimes hard but I do not regret it.
It was risky, and I had no choice: Michel Vaillant has always lived in the contemporary code, everything evolved around him.
What would have been really risky would have been not to change anything, to leave Vaillant in the cotton wool of the fifties, to become a comic book for nostalgic people.
Readers in search of Proust's madeleine, memories of their childhood, can dive back into the Integral Michel Vaillant.
We reissued it by starting from the original coloring pages, adding some great bonuses.
Magnificent work.
And while taking care of the old Michel Vaillant, we created a new one.
Nothing has been destroyed, nothing damaged;
we added new seasons and increased the work.
In 2009, you created the Jean Graton Foundation. What is his mission ?
I created this foundation when I realized the dimension of my father's work.
Michel Vaillant recounted the automotive adventure of the 20th century in all its aspects: societal, industrial, technological, sporting, stylistic (design)… No comic strip has covered a subject in such complete and detailed fashion.
Conversely, Michel Vaillant ended up marking the automotive adventure since this work inspired their vocation to pilots, engineers, journalists and even automotive designers.
Motorsport and car design would not be the same today if Michel Vaillant had not existed!
It is therefore a prodigious work, which is now part of our history and our culture.
It was necessary to prevent it from disappearing, it was necessary to protect all its treasures: the drawings, the original plates, the photographic documentation, the furniture of my father's studio, his correspondence with pilots, etc ... To protect all this within a foundation avoids that it is dispersed in estates, auctions, etc ... The heritage is protected, and will be accessible for new books, exhibitions, student work, TV documentaries or other.
All we have to do now is find a place, and good will to inventory, scan, and organize all this collection!