Blexbolex

Blexbolex: ‘Romance’ (Ballad) comes after ‘L’Imagier Des Gens’ (People) and ‘Saisons’ (Seasons) and was expected to be a picturebook of stories. I had to keep the same structure of the page – a word / an image – so it would fit within the trilogy.

When I started this project at the end of 2009, I had no idea about how to organise it. I had desires and atmospheres in my head but nothing really concrete. Little by little, it became clear that the pictures in the book must by themselves – progressively and step by step – be embedded in a narrative continuity and form a kind of story.

The pages of the book contain, for the most part, quotes from all kinds of stories or visual or literary quotations – some well-known, others less so. The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home. That put me on the path of rhymes, cumulative songs, old folk songs and on the somehow musical structure of the book. It also reminded me in a funny way of my own childhood memories – when I came home from school, of course.

Seeing that the book was going in the direction of storytelling, I also read ‘Morphology of the Folktale’ by Vladimir Propp to make sure I didn’t forget the milestones of the story genre.

It was a long process and I summarised a lot there, but I think I covered the essentials.

Here’s one of my hundreds of pages of notes. At this point, I’m still rather far from the final book – I’m more testing how the form could work with the elements and means. Hours and hours of calculations, but there’s nothing that alcohol and nicotine can’t solve!

The first six parts of the book were rather improvised, but it then became so complicated I needed to do some kind of a storyboard. Here’s an example.

The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.

Here’s the oldest versions of some landscapes along with the final work. I had to redo the bridge one for technical reasons, and could never catch the light and atmosphere again. As revenge, I printed the old picture as a small poster – a three-colour silkscreen.

Here’s the oldest versions of some characters along with the final work.

The witch is one of the main characters in the book. Her aim is to replace the small world that is being built page after page with her own. And she really wants it! If the spells she casts only affected the other characters or objects – but not the words – it seemed to me that this would have less impact on the imagination of the readers. The witch is the true antagonist and she wants to make the book disappear in order to take control, so it seemed logical to me that when she reaches the peak of her power, she can remove the things that were referenced earlier. Her victory may seem almost complete at this point. But despite her power, she only manages to win half the world, so it still has a chance to become itself again. I think this creates suspense and an expectation in this sense.

One of the consequences of this approach is that the gap between the words and images becomes very open. The child reader can have fun remembering the missing words, or perhaps making up their own or questioning them. They can play with their memory or imagination and participate in the story, as I invite them to do. They can become the author too.

I faced difficulties of all kinds throughout the making of the book. The constraints were huge and the difficulty to remain consistent until the end progressively increased. I can’t state all the difficulties I faced, but some were technical and related to the narrative (there’s sequences that I fully started, rewrote and redesigned, even though the book was already half done), and some were related to time and money. I initially tried to finance the book alone by accepting all the illustration work possible – but in doing so, I had no more time for the book. I felt like I was trapped under a spell, with every attempt to make the book moving the possibility of its completion even further away. Over time, my drawing was changing too, so I had to stop making new pages in order to redo the older ones.

What put an end to this vicious circle was the allocation of a creativity grant from the National Book Centre (CNL), which allowed me to work with the necessary continuity. I’m very grateful to them. My publisher at Albin Michel also provided me with constant support from beginning to end. We kept in touch by email and sometimes she had to read thousands of explanations, the poor thing! I’m kidding. Everyone at Albin Michel was great, really.

Illustrations © Blexbolex. Thanks to Claudia Bedrick (Enchanted Lion Books) for supplying the artwork text. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.

Buy the English edition

Romance / Ballad

Blexbolex

Albin Michel Jeunesse, France, 2013

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‘As a story, it's challenging, mysterious, and even obscure. As an object and a piece of bookmaking, it's a work of art.’
—Publishers Weekly

‘All throughout, we're invited to reimagine the narrative as we absorb the growing complexity of the world – a beautiful allegory for our walk through life itself.’
—Brain Pickings

Romance / Ballad was one of the New York Times Best Illustrated Books of 2013.

• French: Albin Michel Jeunesse
• English: Enchanted Lion Books
• Italian: Orecchio Acerbo
• Spanish: Libros del Zorro Rojo
• Portuguese (Brazil): Cosac Naify
• Polish: Wytwórnia
• Czech: Baobab Books
• German: Jacoby & Stuart
• Norwegian: Magikon
• Dutch: Clavis