“There is a loyalty and a common history that develops” for the author Jul

Every day, a personality invites themselves into the world of Élodie Suigo. Wednesday, September 18, 2024: comic book author Jul. “Silex and the city – La Clef” has just been published by Dargaud, “Silex and the City – the film” has been on the big screen since September 11 and an exhibition on the series can be seen at the Musée de l’Homme until December 29, 2024.

Jul is a press cartoonist and author of comic strips inseparable from caves and prehistory. His prehistory began very early on the school benches with a pencil as his best friend, a true creator of the imagination and witness to everyday life and our past. It was after leaving the École Normale Supérieure and after an aggregation in history that he really started as a press cartoonist and met his audience when he received the Goscinny prize for his album We must kill José Bové, in 2007. Two years later, his first series, Silex and the city, is born. A series which is currently available in three formats with the release of the 10th volume of the comic, The Keyat Dargaud. The film Silex and the City has been on the big screen since September 11 and until December 29, 2024, an exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris is dedicated to him.

franceinfo: The Key tells for the first time in this series the evolution, progress and the encounter between prehistory and the modern world, embodied by a store that often poses problems when building furniture. Finally, having the key is not enough?

Jul: No, you have to understand a little bit why we do things. Indeed, this family of Homo Sapiens, who are inadvertently projected into the future, come back with this key without knowing what it is and will trigger everything. Writing, the invention of religion, yoga, Nazism, contemporary art like a jumble. In fact, this bent key is a kind of transitional object, we project anything. If we are spiritual, if we thirst for religion, we invent a new god. If we are libidinous, we see it as an object of sexual desire. All possible cults resemble us and so this bent key is a bit of a mirror of our passions and of everything that is a bit absurd, so it’s quite funny to put all that on stage.

Silex and the cityis a bit of an extension of who you are. We feel that everything interests you. You started very early on the school benches, I have the impression that you already had an adult’s perspective.

It’s true that my first drawings were jokes about Raymond Barre, Minister of the Economy, and I was very small. It was everything that happened a bit by chance on television and that I metabolized and transformed into funny things. I was very anxious. We talked a lot about the rivalry between the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc. There was still the USSR. We thought there would be a nuclear war. I had nightmares about it at night. I drew atomic shelters with plans, hundreds of them, that my parents kept. I was an anxious person. Even today, the world is extremely distressing, both this kind of headlong rush towards the ecological abyss and towards warlike madness. The only way is to distance yourself with laughter. I found drawing.

“These comics, this film are also a way of saying: ‘we continue to live and remain dignified despite the catastrophe’ and that’s cool too.”

There has always been humor in everything you have done. Is humor also the key to transmitting?

Humor, which is the prerogative of often tormented people, has a special magic. Anything artistic, tinged with humor, is not content with an astral existence, cut off from people. Everything in the realm of humor is relational because if you make a joke, someone has to hear it and understand it and laugh. I have that sharing with comic books. It’s that kind of little warmth that passes between people, a little spark like when two flints rub together. It’s to share around the bistro, around the counter, around a table, otherwise I waste away. In class, when I drew, it was to draw attention to myself, to make the girls around me laugh. It continued and I don’t think it ever stopped. It’s that taste, that excitement.

You have become a must-see, a cartoonist who is part of our lives. What does that inspire in you?