How important is this aspect for your work ? And how do you think the sense of intuition you were mentioning fits with the way you publish your work ? Since My Boy ( Bries, 2006) and The Man Who Grew His Beard ( Fantagraphics, 2011), you have been very active in the small-press world : editions with a low print-run, mini-comics, zines, contributions to anthologies and magazines, etc.

In Arsène the reader is not asked to take the whole story as the truth, some things will (hopefully) feel genuine in a emotional sense, other things are more ironic or just nonsensical.īy avoiding a factually accurate approach to autobiography, making the story in a more freewheeling, intuitive way, even allowing total nonsense, I hope to stumble into more interesting territories.īenoît Crucifix : Regarding the publication format, you first self-published Arsène as a three-part series, printed on a Risograph, distributed by mail and in a few comics stores. When talking about my grandfather, whom I didn’t know that well, I kept that in mind. It gets extra problematic when you talk about others since it’s already very difficult to have a clear sense of yourself. Things seem to simple and compact because they’re forced into the straitjacket that is a story. I’ve tried in the past to do some straightforward autobio, but even though these stories were more factually true, they also felt like bigger lies. Arsène and Greys do parody the autobiographical genre in some ways, but for the most part I’m just looking for a way to talk about personal issues and observations in a way that engages me. Even if it’s talking about people and events that have no direct link to the author. Olivier Schrauwen : It seems to me that a comic, especially when it’s made by one author, is bound to be auto-biographical in some way. Before we talk about the publishing history, could you tell a bit more about your feelings towards that discourse and your approach to your grandfather’s ‘biography’ ? Your comic Greys can also be read along those lines, parodying the whole discourse around graphic novels and autobiography. Yet, it also reads like an ‘anti-graphic novel’ : it is nothing like the autobio memoir genre, which we could have expected, it was first self-published in three installments, etc. Benoît Crucifix : To some extent, we could say that Arsène Schrauwen is your first graphic novel, in the sense that it is one long narrative, where your other books were shorter and more fragmented, and that it tackles your family history.

Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen