the essential
In his latest comic album “Sang neuf”, the Toulouse designer Jean-Christophe Chauzy recounts his experience with the disease. The lively story, the creativity of the author, the humanity that inhabits all the pages make it a fascinating subject to read…
La Dépêche du Midi: In 2021, you published “Par la forêt”, an important work for you…
Jean-Christophe Chauzy: It’s the book that I signed before I learned that I was really ill, that I tried, as best I could, to draw and which helped me to think of other things thing than the hypothesis of death. It is absolutely linked to a difficult moment and it has given me a lot.
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This difficult moment, your placement in a sterile room due to myelofibrosis, resulted in this new album, “Sang neuf”. Was it complicated to consider or did it have a “curative” value?
To tell the truth, I didn’t think about it alone, I was recovering, without being sure that it was permanent and it still isn’t. But my editor at the time suggested to me that I had a rather special subject to deal with, given the specificity of my business, the graft, the transformation. It took me a while to admit that she was right, but it allowed me to sort everything out, put the pain away and work on an artistic or literary object.
My partner, who is a very good reader, was careful to ensure that the album was as clear as possible, without complacency. It’s paradoxical because, technically, it’s much less time-consuming than “The Rest of the World”, for example. The pages of the latter take a long time to draw but they are less complicated to do than the simple images of “New Blood” in fact, because everything that is simple is more difficult.
Indeed, we feel that you have given free rein to your creativity!
When I agreed to work on this album, I wasn’t aware of everything it would cover. The illness, the loneliness, the fact that we are getting older, the family, what we are losing, the terror, the anguish, the gratitude towards the people at the hospital, towards my sister… And while drawing, I realized that what I had written required a number of graphic challenges because a lot of what I experienced, I experienced from the inside in fact. It couldn’t be seen. I didn’t have surgery, my body lost weight but because of the chemo. Everything else, the denial, the fear, the guilt, the anxiety, are not seen.
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The way you translate it into the pages that pay tribute to your sister are incredible…
If this book has a hero, it’s my sister! She’s the superhero, the only one with superpowers! And what powers! She grants me a second birth and that is more than extraordinary. The difficulty lay in representing what the doctors said through figures, phenomena, cells that can only be seen on a microscope.
At the hospital, I tried to imagine everything that was being told to me, but what images could I base on that? How to represent the blood test of my sister’s stem cells which pass through my veins and end up in my bones, how they clean up, how they take the place of mine. I was obliged to find equivalents with the visual world that we know and when this is not possible there is abstraction, the ink blot, black and white, the capacity for evocation of elementary forms.
Has this album changed the way you work?
It allowed me to rediscover my profession, to work differently. I had to learn to paint in washes, which I had never done and it’s not easy. It doesn’t behave like watercolor, the paper doesn’t react in the same way, it quickly creates stains whose texture we can’t control. There is a large amount of uncertainty and it is quite consistent with the illness that affected me. I had to make it simpler and it’s difficult to be simple and expressive.
And now I’m possibly seeing the consequences that this could have on what I’m doing. I am working on the last two volumes of the “The Rest of the World” series which will be released in 2025 and beyond. I had so many questions about the ending of the first four volumes that I had to get back to it! (laughs) In the meantime, my publisher is going to release “The Rest of the World” in full so I will have to do another cover for this box set.
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