Suffer and be reborn with Chauzy

Jean-Christophe Chauzy chose to share, in a comic strip, the journey through the illness that almost took him away. In “New Blood”, he tells his story and finds images to depict the body, pain, fear and hope.

It is clear that for several years, sharing one’s suffering in comics has been an autobiographical approach which is no longer so rare. With some high quality books.

A logbook on the verge of death

We are thinking here of Poor health record by Pozla, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Angoulême festival in 2016, and in which the author recounted his Crohn’s disease. Or even to When you thought I was dead, by Matthieu Blanchin, the story of 10 days of coma, and his return to life. Today, Jean-Christophe Chauzy, well known for his autofictions and his thrillers, in which the protagonists always look a lot like him, tall, lanky and a little jilted, signs New blood.

Nearly four years ago, he, who thought he was safe from harm, was diagnosed with acute leukemia (to be exact, level 3 myelofibrosis). Chauzy is now out of the woods, thanks to a bone marrow transplant – thank you, little sister – and he felt the need to put into images his pain, his doubts, in the face of the galloping illness, the empathy of the caregivers, the hopes and failures, and finally, liberation.

“The pain, the loneliness, the astonishment, the permanent uncertainty, the fear of death all the time, these are things that have no visual translation in what comics are used to doing. Everything the job was to imagine precisely how to embody these things that were happening in my head.”

Jean-Christophe Chauzy,

at franceinfo

Chauzy chose to work in black and white, simple sketches when memories of happy days come to the surface, with more or less thick Indian ink, which flows onto the paper depending on the mood of the moment. Red too, for the stale then healthy blood, which bubbles and pulses in the weakened body.

When the color, the real one, returns in the last pages, we feel like letting go of everything to go for a walk and enjoy life.

New blood by Jean-Christophe Chauzy, published by Casterman

Further with Chauzy…