Secret Gardeners

BART BEATY: We were talking at lunch about the fact that you haven't published anything now for about two years since your last book came out. And now in the next six months you have five books coming out. You'll have the sixth Monsieur Jean album from Dupuis, the new Henriette, which will be the fourth in this series, also from Dupuis. You have the remix of Petit Peintre from Cornélius. You have a new sketchbook from Cornélius.

CHARLES BERBERIAN: Tangiers, yes.

BEATY: And also a book from Oog and Blik, the Dutch publisher.

BERBERIAN: Hopefully.

PHILIPPE DUPUY: And a book of poetry, French poetry, which we have illustrated. So it's more than you say, it's six books.

BEATY: Who's publishing the anthology?

DUPUY: Bayard.

BEATY: Which is a very large French press. If you could sum it up, what's the difference between working with a large publishing house like Dupuis now -- which is a new relationship for you -- and with someone like Cornélius who have their offices just down the stairs from your atelier.

BERBERIAN: Well, the thing is, looking the way you do at these different publishers, you might think that it's very different, but in fact it isn't. I mean, we have established a long-time relationship with Cornélius, with Bayard we started doing illustration back in '87.

BEATY: Did they do the Trenet book?

BERBERIAN: No, that was Albin Michel, but it was with a publisher we had met at Bayard, because people move around. And for Dupuis, the publisher we're working with used to be at Humanos. So, we got to a point where we're working with people who we really know now; we have a long-time relationship with these people; they really know our work; we know the way they work; we like to work with them. And it's a lot of... comment dire? If we say we're looking for something, we don't really know what we're going to achieve going through this kind of book, but that's the way we want to work this book. They would say, "OK, let's try this with you, because we know the way you work. We know what you're looking for -- the kind of things you're looking for. Let's try this with you." Like with the anthology, we would say, "We're going through our sketchbooks to see what drawings we can fit in the book." Or we would draw a lot of drawings like...

DUPUY: One is used to just giving the text to an illustrator, who then illustrates the text. It's OK, you know? There's something about a dog, and the illustrator is drawing a dog. It doesn't mean that we can't put a drawing of the dog, but we didn't make it with the poetry in mind; we said, "Poetry is something with images and feelings and like this and so we are going to make our work like that."

BERBERIAN: If we were working on a movie and trying to put some music into this story...

DUPUY: So, you can complete, really, but can't have... not to be too close with the story or text .. wait for the text. So, we work like that, and they were not used to it. We saw that at the beginning, but that was very great for us because they said, "OK, you want to do that; we want to work with you, so we are working with you and OK, go do that." And it was funny to see the book shaping up little by little because, anyway, if you are not doing it like that it's just work. And after maybe 10 drawings we said, "Oh, I don't want to do that. It's not funny."

BEATY: Not another dog drawing!

DUPUY: Yeah. This is like that one of the portraits about the dog and I had a drawing of the dog, "Oh look it's like this." But sometimes it's more, not really the same thing. Someone speaking about windows, we put in a drawing of something in the street. But when you look through a window, sometimes you can see streets. OK, that works! So it's very strange, like music, you know, and feelings, and sometimes OK I can't explain, but I want to put some red in here because I feel it's good. The idea is not to do... We are going to make a book to imagine it's really for this kind of children you can sell it. It's a book we want to have.

BERBERIAN: And that's the way we work all our books. The books we want to have. And doing a Monsieur Jean book, it goes in a similar way. We say, "What's the next Monsieur Jean about?" We don't really know. But this is what's going to happen, at least in the beginning, but from then on, we don't really know where it's going. And they're not going to wait for us to see what's going to happen at the last sequence to sign a contract. They will say, "Go ahead, guys." And it's not like we're -- comment dire? -- best sellers. We don't sell that many books, because we work that way.

BEATY: More space ships! [Laughter.]

BERBERIAN: [Laughing.] More space ships!

DUPUY: OK, now I understand why!

BERBERIAN: We just say, "OK." And that's why we like working with Cornélius -- or when we used to do books with L'Association, that worked the same way, because we're not trying to achieve something very definite. It's the way we want to work things, that's where we connect...

BEATY: Is this a philosophy about the way you want to work that matches the philosophy of the publisher?

BERBERIAN: Well, a book in process is such a great experience. It's really fantastic. It's a really amazing playground. It's the same feeling you get when you read a book -- you have a lot of pleasure reading. It's a wonderful playground, and it's very emotionally gratifying when you read a book you haven't written, because you're the spectator, you just see things happening before your eyes, and it's so great. The echo you have as a reader with a book, the ideas, the best books you ever read is when you have the feeling you grew up after reading these books, you know? And the process of making a book, as a publisher or an illustrator or a comic book artist or a writer, it's the same kind of feeling, and to share this experience with a publisher, it gets really interesting. That's the way we like working with someone like Cornélius. When we talked about the Petit Peintre book or the sketchbooks, we don't know what the book is going to look like in the beginning, and that's the way I like L'Association books or Cornélius's books, or when we talk about our projects with Blutch or Jean-Claude Denis, you know, the work in progress, when you talk about the scenarios and stuff like that, it's really very exciting. So, sharing this experience with someone who's really implicated in that -- a publisher like Sebastian at Dupuis, or Jean-Louis at Cornélius, you have a response to what you're trying to do and the fact that we all get excited about this. It just pushes the book a little bit further. When you're happy with a page, you know that you can go on to another page. When you're unhappy with a page, you're not just going to say, "Wait, my day of work is off and now it's time to move on." You just say, "No, I'm done. Keep on working until I'm happy with this," because I'm not going to fool my partners with this. It has to be good.

BEATY: One of the scenes I really liked in Journal d'un Album is in the last chapter, talking about who's going to publish this book. Is it going to be a Humanos book, because it's a book about working on a Humanos book, or is it going to be an L'Association book because it's in that kind of spirit of what L'Association is doing? And you get to the end of the book and it says, "Oh, it'll be a Humanos book." And of course as a reader, you're reading it and you know it's a L'Association book. Do you find yourself -- I think I know the answer -- but do you find yourself really in sympathy with the type of things L'Association has been doing over the last 10 years? I remember when you won the award for Best Album at Angoulême three or four years ago. I remember seeing you the next day with television cameras following you around -- which is probably hard for American readers to understand: Television cameras showed up to film the award winners. And you were walking around the Cornélius booth and L'Association booth and talking in front of them rather than in front of the Humanos booth as kind of a way of saying "This is where we're at. These are our friends. These are the people that we'd like to draw attention to."

BERBERIAN: Like Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics, and what they have done in the publishing business in North America, L'Association was in a terrain vague. Everything was burned out when L'Association emerged out of nothing, and you see what's happening today in France, not to say Europe, it's basically what L'Association's started -- and Cornélius, which was at the beginning.

DUPUY: Anyway, I think we wanted to show the media L'Association and Cornélius because it was really important, because I can't imagine anything here in Europe without these kind of publishers. If we were obliged to have everything with only the big publishers -- and we like it because we are doing books with them -- but we couldn't do so many things, you know? This is true that today we are moving from Humanos to Dupuis. At Humanos there was a collection of black and white books. But at Dupuis there isn't. Maybe this will change; we don't know. But at this time, if we want to do a black and white book with Dupuis, I'm not sure we can do it. So it's very great to... you can see, with the Petit Pientre remake -- "reloaded" [laughter] -- but Monsieur Jean and Henriette is not the same. We want to have the possibility of doing that, and without Cornélius, L'Association and the others, it's not possible. It would be very, very sad. The other thing very important is that Dupuis, Dargaud, Les Humanos, and all that, they needed L'Association and Cornélius to see the new authors. I don't know why they couldn't see because they were there. If L'Association found it, it was possible. But now you have Sfar, Blain, David B. publishing with Dupuis and Dargaud -- and with L'Association and Cornélius -- like us. And all that changed...

BERBERIAN: The major input of L'Association and people like Cornélius in the publishing field in France was to bring back the book to its subject, which wasn't the case up til the early '90s. I mean, (A Suivre) had tried with the collection Romans with Ballade de la mer salée by Hugo Pratt, Ici Même by Tardi and Forest, but they had lost track on the line, and in the early '90s, like I said, everything was lost and burnt out. It was horrible what was happening.

DUPUY: The comic books were only serials.

BERBERIAN: You didn't care about the subject of the book anymore.

DUPUY: We were speaking about serials and not of stories, you know? And now, what you see, when you are working for L'Association and Cornélius, in the beginning, it's not for money, because there is no money. You have really another reason to do it. This is why you have really good books, because people who are making it really have something to say -- they are not making it for fame and media and money, to be famous.

BERBERIAN: The way the serials appealed to the readers at the time was to just write another book and put it on the shelves alongside the rest of the collection, and the major quality of the book would be to match the size of the rest of the volumes. So bringing the comic books back to their subject was something really important at the time because it was at the same moment that the magazines (A Suivre) and Métal Hurlant all dried out or died or whatever, and, of course, at that time, if an author would work on a book, it would [almost] be as a journalist. He would publish a story first in a magazine before it would go into a book. The profession was changing; it was mutating, but they didn't want to face this mutation. They were just saying, "Let's keep things as they were. Let's keep on with the series and collections." And that's where we started Monsieur Jean. We were thinking that at that time, we can't deal with this thing anymore. It's just going nowhere, but on the other hand, we have to because that's the way we're going to have a deal with a publisher. So, let's try and do a character who would go aging with us, that will help us change the character, and progress the series.

BEATY: If you'd said, "Let's come up with an idea for a great money-making series," saying, "OK, I'm going to write about a late-'20s writer living in Paris dating girls." You would think this is maybe not the way to make a million dollars in the comic book business of the early 1990s.

DUPUY: Oh, no? Are you sure? [Laughter.]

BERBERIAN: We were working as illustrators in the ads and magazines, and that gave us a certain independence toward the publishing business. So we would do comics as a very personal thing, like, as we say in French, jardin secret, a secret garden. But the thing is that when L'Association came out, it just pointed out the fact that our profession's magazine thing is over and dead. Now we're doing books, OK? And that is how we're going to do this, and you have a publisher like Jean-Christophe Menu who said, "I'm going to make covers for the authors' work, and working in the same perspective was Étienne Robial."

BEATY: Of Futuropolis.

BERBERIAN: He was the first publisher in France to put the name of the author bigger than the title of the book. When we worked on Journal d'un Album, that's when we realized that Jean-Christophe was really into the book perspective. He knew what the book was like and how he would have to shape it to have a nice book in his hands. And that's where you get to 20 years later with a book like Chris Ware's book or Dan Clowes', and Pantheon.

BEATY: Or even Marjane Satrapi's book from Pantheon, for which he did the design.

BERBERIAN: Exactly. You have to know that in France, L'Association is the only publisher who has revealed to a very large audience a young author like Marjane Satrapi, and no major publisher has achieved that kind of revelation lately. None. No publisher. Dargaud, Delcourt -- Joann Sfar and Trondheim were born at L'Association and Cornélius, not at Dargaud. Marjane Satrapi is the only author that has reached a large audience in the landscape where she was born. Not Iran, but L'Association -- born as an author. So this is really something very, very important. The thing is that a lot of authors like Trondheim have moved on to major publishers because they couldn't reach a big audience with L'Association. Or we would have started publishing with a major publisher and then do our small books, which we still do, with small publishers. If we're talking about the way the future is evolving, it's a long run, because L'Association started their business 10 years ago. But they have that kind of achievement today -- someone like Marjane, or books like Joann Sfar's Ukelélé, which is totally from another planet. There is only one publisher who would have been able to do this book today, and it's L'Association. And there's only one author who could do that kind of book, and it's Joann Sfar. So that's where you have the efficiency of a publisher, of buying that kind of book, of being the reader of that kind of book. This is very gratifying for the reader, for the author and for the publisher. And this is, really, the ultimate publishing experience. It's the greatest you can think of.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #260.]

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