Numa Sadoul made the Hergé, Uderzo, Gir/Moebius, Bilal and company speak, speak, speak, geniuses cartoonists. As he prepares to meet Riad Sattouf, the redesign of the extraordinary And Franquin created the gaffe provides an opportunity to probe the background interview champion.
We are in February 1985. The first hours of the “torture of the question”, as Franquin says, were the longest. The childhood, the influences, the beginnings, it’s not too exhausting, but the conversation quickly turns around the deep depression from which the designer barely emerges. Numa Sadoul, very gently, offers André Franquin to “dig a little”, at the very least to try. Franquin almost rebels, pushed to his limits. “You see the difficulty of what you’re asking me here: it’s getting a guy to tell his story whose life he fundamentally dislikes, who hates himself in the course of this life and who would no longer want anything to do with this guy who is himself! “ROGNNTUDJUU!” Prunelle would grumble.
It took a big decade for Sadoul to convince Franquin to give himself up (his wife, Liliane, and their daughter, Isabelle, pushed together). With his books of interviews with Hergé (events Tintin and mepublished in 1975) then Jean Giraud (Mister Moebius and Doctor Gir, in 1976), the affable but tenacious Numa, exegete and fan, confessor and friend, imposes himself on Franquin as the only possible “adversary” for what will inevitably be a “combat”. At his end of the transatlantic wire, at home, in the south of France – where he works mainly in the world of theater and opera – the septuagenarian Sadoul comments: “A fraternal fight. After those ten years of denial, from the moment it started, there wasn’t a second I felt like he wanted to escape. Suddenly, he lent himself to the game, entirely. In complete confidence. »
pleasure and torture
Eight days. In three steps. “Thirty-four hours of dialogue spread over 26 audio cassettes”, specifies the author. “We were at his house, in his living room, in the South, the weather was good. We were calm. We drank beers from time to time. We had good meals. That’s the whole Franquin paradox: we experienced it with pleasure, despite the torture. “There are great laughs, he underlines, between the pitiless glances of the perfectionist craftsman to the excess in front of the “badly done up” boxes, the “failures” and other “horrors”.
Nevertheless, reading this constant denigration is exhausting, you need breaks. “It gets heavy at times, it’s true, but you had to go through it to understand his need to make people laugh, gag after gag. Fortunately, he is sometimes happy! And he compensates by praising Hergé, Will, Morris, Jijé… His capacity for wonder is as great as his critical spirit. »
Bad faith, in all honesty
Franquin’s bad faith, to which he braced himself like a lifeboat that was taking on water, aroused “Come on! to his friend Numa, amazed to learn, for example, that Franquin’s animal does not like The marsupilami’s nest. His masterpiece! “The fan in me was bristling! The soup heating up, Numa will go so far as to interrupt a self-destruction session: “Let’s move on, otherwise we’ll fight each other…” Friendship saves them. And the conversation can resume. “I have a very insidious way of insisting, of going back. When I feel he doesn’t want to talk or is evading, I tell him we’ll come back to it and then I start pounding again, and he always ends up spilling the beans. The method of the judicial police! »
It will be easier with Riad Sattouf, we say to ourselves. “He was the one who asked me, precisely when he saw that Franquin was going to come out. And since I’m a fan of Riad and he is for me the most interesting author of today’s comics, I gladly accepted. I might not go that far with him, because he’s younger and he still has a lot to produce. A second version may be needed in ten years! »
In the meantime, this new edition of the classic And Franquin created the gaffe weighs its weight, augmented by an exceptional and remarkably complementary iconography.
No to prohibitions, yes to explanations
If he is still and always an assiduous reader of comics, and not too focused on the received idea of a golden age necessarily over, Numa Sadoul nevertheless notes the well-meaning slippages that lead to burnings and bans of comics. “I’m not against changing mentalities, it’s good that now we’re interested in all the harm we’ve done in the past, but on condition that it’s limited to pedagogy. We must not destroy, but learn. When there was the story of Tintin in the Congo, it was not necessary in any case to prohibit it, but to add a preface which would have placed it in its time. »
On the other hand, he is on the side of Isabelle Franquin in her vigilance concerning Gaston, the character closest to her father (died in 1997). “Delaf is a very fine artist, who responded perfectly to demand and who worked hard for five years: he was told to do Gaston identically. We forgot in passing that Gaston was a personal work, and that the excellence of the drawing or the gags is not enough to instil the Gaston spirit. Gaston is really Franquin himself, his revolt, his love of life, of animals, of plants, his hatred of a lot of things that constrain life. Delaf should have been allowed to do a personal work, perhaps inspired by Gaston. That said, I don’t think Isabelle Franquin would have wanted to, she is really protecting her father’s will. »
Sadoul himself did not have permission to include in the new edition the interviews conducted between 1986 and 1997. “We continued to talk to each other, he and I, that’s for sure. Maybe one day…” Anything is possible. Including the inflatable consecration, like the face of Fantasio in The wrong head. How would Franquin react to soaring prices for the least of his table corner drawings at public auctions? Would he finally be convinced of his worth? “He would howl with laughter, yes! Let’s quote the laughing seagull: “HIHIHIÂAR! »