What to call this? A parenthesis? Too short. An eternity? Too long. A tunnel? Too gloomy. I am going for a long absence. and even a ” very “ of duration: about forty years, a period during which Nicole Claveloux stayed away from comics before returning to it. The final milestone in a process of rediscovery of her work that began a few years ago, the publication, these days, of This night is a nightmare (Cornelius) celebrates the surprising return of a long-forgotten 84-year-old illustrator by the 9my art.
A sacred monster of children’s literature, the distinguished guest of the Parisian comics festival Formula Bula (September 20-22) also dispels a stubborn misunderstanding according to which the world would have rejected her, unless it were the other way around. “Neither one nor the other”He corrects himself this afternoon in mid-August, in his house in Moëlan-sur-Mer (Finistère). It is raining incessantly in the Bigouden country, the fire crackles in the fireplace. The reality is, in fact, more prosaic.
In 1987, exhausted by years of poor sales, the magazine screaming metal puts the key under the door. With the scriptwriter Edith Zha, Nicole Claveloux published two dreamlike gems in this pioneering magazine, one of the first to take comics out of the ghetto of children’s literature: The green hand (Associated Humanoids, 1978) and Off-season (Humanoids associated, 1979). The first story tells the hair-raising adventures of a nostalgic crow and a young dreamer. The second, of a surrealist tone, follows the steps of two private detectives (to whom the authors have lent their characters) who investigate the disappearance of a “sad man”.
Other short stories would later form a collection of short stories, The Little Green Vegetable Who Dreamed of Being a Panther and Other Stories (Humanoids associated, 1980). And then the phone stopped ringing just as a decisive turning point in the history of comics was beginning: its transformation into an industry for mass entertainment purposes. As its current editor and founder of Cornélius, Jean-Louis Gauthey, explains, many artists who attempted graphic and narrative experiments with the medium were abandoned by a publishing sector that only bet on historical series and adventures, such as Francis Masse and Gérald Poussin, Guy Peellaert (1934-2008) and therefore Nicole Claveloux.
hypnotic style
“There is certainly some truth in that, but the fact is also that I stopped making adult comics simply because screaming metal disruptedthe latter confesses today. I hadn’t looked for opportunities at that time, because I don’t do much marketing. I’m waiting for people to contact me. And if the publisher is also waiting for us to contact him, that’s fine, it’s that stupid. Then I went back to making children’s books. » Mainly illustrated albums, but also some comics for younger readers, his bibliography includes no less than one hundred and forty works by the mid-1980s, including those from his early years, published after his move to Paris in 1966, when he left the country. He was born in Saint-Etienne, where his mother taught.
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