In the comic strip “The spiral notebook”, published last March, the French Bedéaste Didier Tronchet lifts the veil on his family secrets and highlights a heroic mother.
Decided to unravel the mysteries surrounding his family history, Didier Tronchet returns to the one who saw him born. Direction northern France, where his mother grew up. Like an investigating journalist, he makes the trip with a spiral notebook in his pocket.
But for the generation of his mother, and in this region of Pas-de-Calais, one does not dwell on his own person and even less on his life, which one considers uninteresting. Will the mother be interviewed by her son? Made unexpected, Zulma gives herself up. She speaks and tells.
Everything is rigorously true, this is the commitment I spent with the reader. It is not watered down (…), these are so strong episodes that I do not see the point of inventing.
Little by little takes shape a real character. A heroine born in the 1930s, who grew up in the mining basin. She loses her young father and leads a work of work from the childhood bonus. As adolescence under the occupation, she escapes death several times. Thus, when I got back from the cinema with a band of friends during a curfew, they are aligned by a skilled German patrol that shoots three.
Widowed at the age of 38, she raises her four children alone. The author is 3 years old when his father disappears. This figure from which he will wait all his life the return will hover like a ghost even in his work and at the heart of his fictional albums.
An act of consolation
For Didier Tronchet, book and literature have cathartic virtues. They allow him to realize what we did not know and what could not be said. As a result, “the spiral notebook” is also for the author an act of consolation.
-So is that the story? I find my father, shortly before his death … as in the goose game … I make a double six and I replay …
Used to breaking the codes of the comic strip, Didier Tronchet offers an album without boxes. We stroll with him in a chain of very colorful paintings, reflections of his emotions. We follow his quest that looks like a treasure hunt. It takes us both in its spatio-temporal and brain convolutions. Never, however, readers are lost, or get tired. The author remains faithful to his sense of humor and derision. It is now less corrosive, but more tender and deep. Live text and expressive drawing mixed, comics acts like a magnet over the pages that turn.
With sincerity and veracity “The Spiral notebook” by Didier Tronchet crowns an ever more personal series of albums, started in 2020 with “The singer lost”, continued in 2023 by “the ghost year”, the set by Dupuis editions in the Aire Libre collection.
Céline O’Clin/LD
Didier Tronchet, “The Spiral Book”, Dupuis editions. Published on March 28, 2025.
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