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While we were in Toronto, we saw the awesome French comics artist Joann Sfar give a talk at the public library to help publicize his new book The Rabbi's Cat, which I highly recommend (we brought our copy all the way there just to get it autographed). Not only does Sfar not pencil his comics, going directly to ink instead; he doesn't even write them in advance. He says it's like turning on a TV and setting it to a channel and then just writing down what he sees in his head, and that good characters write themselves. I guess this explains how he manages to sustain his prodigious output, with around a hundred books to his name to date, and him not all that much older than I am. He also cited Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch as influences, and said he thought HBO was producing the most exciting work of our era with its serial epics that manage to sustain a story with an ensemble cast indefinitely, season after season. I guess I will stop avoiding HBO.
Also (pardon me here, non-comics-geeks): it turned out that my hunch that the (uncredited) coloring in The Rabbi's Cat was similar to that of the Lapinot books was right - it's the same colorist, and she isn't credited due to a misprint in the English edition. Also, he confirmed that the lettering in the English edition is a computer font of his own handwriting, and the (excellent) translation turns out to be by a friend of his. Apparently the secret to finding good translators is to pick one who knows you personally and really gets your sense of humor. Anyway, this is by way of saying that you ought to read The Rabbi's Cat. It's a substantial read, funny and grave and wicked, describing Jews, Muslims, and Christians interacting in French-occupied North Africa in the earlier part of the past century, and striking a novel balance between the secular and religious. Roughly speaking, book 1 deals with the cat, book 2 with the Rabbi, and book 3 with the big picture. I really like it. When you're done with that you can move on to Dungeon: a comic he co-authors with Lewis Trondheim, whom I've written about before. The talk was organized by The Beguiling and in fact the store's super-nice owner(?) Peter Birkemoe was Sfar's interlocutor. The Beguiling was shockingly small, but lived up to its fantastic reputation as the place for indie comics in North America. Thousands of dollars worth of original sketches and art line the staircase. Oh, and man, Nalo Hopkinson sat in the same row as me during the talk, though I was too shy to say much to her beyond "Are you Nalo Hopkinson?" and "Omigod!" Apparently I've been mispronouncing her first name: it rhymes with "follow."
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