Luz: "The drawing can not be a religion"

Luz traces in indelible his years spent at Charlie. Meeting with a man who refuses to eat chouquettes.

Luz laughs sometimes like Cabu. A kid's joy caught in default. It is disturbing to hear this laughter disappeared since January 7, 2015. It's hard to know if the atmosphere Charlie Hebdo was so collegial that some would rub off on others, but one would be happy to believe it. Luz, 46, left the weekly magazine in September 2015 after more than twenty years of drawings, sketches, covers, reports, concerts, shouting, jokes, salt talk, bad jokes, shared cakes. Yes, all that. Everything that makes office life, especially in a newspaper.

Luz tells in indelible his years Charlie. Also his friends. Cabu, Tignous, Wolinski, Honoré, Charb. An album like a pain and a joy. Which overflows with energy, enthusiasm, chills, tears stuck under the pen. With Catharsis, Luz was trying to mourn a January so black, with indelible, he goes back to life, right like an "i". Laughing, worried, but laughing. During the interview, he did not touch the chouquettes that held out his arms. It is to say if the boy is concentrated and serious.

EXPRESS. indelible is a multi-faceted title: the spot on the fingers, the events that do not disappear … Why did you choose it?

Luz: I found it when I finished the album. It happened suddenly. At first, I imagined calling it "My diary", but it's a title to the con that made Andre Gide with the posh side, but without the talent. In indelible, there is the idea of ​​the trace and the word "stupid". It's entertaining. It is a very beautiful word that badociates the memory imprint and the triviality.

This album is a way of describing the normality of this work of draftsman. The extraordinary has been sufficiently told to also say the collective adventure of making a newspaper every week. What happened to us in the face froze the words "Charlie Hebdo" in the drama; I wanted to tell people who work, who laugh, who discuss life, bad, politics, the state of the world, but never football or car, which is noteworthy. Cabu, Tignous, Charb and the others are clerks.

Have you always been drawing?

I am always amazed to know how to draw. Everyone draws; what is mysterious is why a kid continues while his parents push him towards judo or piano. Or to a real job. With a pencil too, it is work that leads to quality. Then you have to accept the idea of ​​being the crucible of others' drawings. Any artist is in the permanent digestion of his art.

Gotlib represented, teenager, the first approach of the bizarre trait. I'm 11 years old and I buy Rhââ Lovely but I ask my father to bring the album to the store because I am very embarrbaded by the representation of bad. I prefer Spirou and Fantasio, but, unconsciously, I understand that drawing can be transgressive. Realistic comics, I do not care. I am fascinated by the big noses way Achille Talon, Iznogoud and The Mickey's Diary ; I am therefore sold very young to American imperialism. The shock is Crumb's albums; I'm 20 years old.

Work in a newspaper like Charlie Hebdo, was it to find the alliance between an adult vision of the world and the childlike pleasure of drawing?

Yes that's it. In the face of the serious world imposed on us, our valve is an almost childlike way of working that has protected us for a long time. This is the text that is attacked in court, almost never the drawing, often reduced to little Mickey. Up to the caricatures of Mohammed; everything has changed, everything has changed. The drawing was invested with a responsibility that no longer protected us. He was considered by fools. Today, a cartoon can be found everywhere, unlike a comic book, more complicated to read in its entirety. A drawing in Charlie can reach Bombay or Los Angeles, and anyone can judge it when it is not addressed to him. And here, it's all on the floor.

You can also draw to transmit, to inform, to defend a subject, no?

Maybe but the circle of humor is restricted to culture. This is the difference between us, Charlie, and Plantu, who said, "Watch out for the offense." Well no, I never think of Papuans, Danes or Martians and the possibility of offending them does not even come to mind.

Starting from this principle, you only speak to convinced people …

The question is not to convince but to see things differently. I am close to Gébé saying that a drawing is a way of looking at the world by stepping aside. I am not proselyte. I badume that the ideal reader is me. So no self-censorship. As a reader, I prefer to be trusted. Drawing can not be a religion.

When you published The Mégret manage the city [de Vitrolles] in 1998, did not you want to convince readers of the dangerousness of the FN?

First, I wanted to bring the guy on a pedestal, Bruno Mégret, at the level of everyone. Then make fun the friends who were in Vitrolles. A drawing helps people see the world with less frowning eyebrows. It is better to smile and take the distance to understand what is changing in society or in oneself. But laughter is indispensable. There is nothing that annoys a powerful person more than laughing at him. A drawing can help people drop ballast and then start fighting again.

What is a good drawing?

It's a good drawing.

Seen like that, obviously … It avoids the debate.

A drawing at the Charlie, it does not mean much. Charlie, it's a newspaper that brings together different people who have in common a mutual respect, a love of drawing, a political positioning of the plural left with, from time to time, a right-wing guy, so who voted socialist. But everyone had his line and his drawing. On the 11th of January, after the attack, people also came down for various reasons: fear, defense of humor, emotion … Humor Charlie, that does not mean much, either. Republican? Secular? Without a doubt. Atheist, certainly. Charlie, it is a bond of trust with the reader.

Work at Charlie Are you missing now that you have left?

What I miss is the excitement of writing and reporting. Making a newspaper is a great collective adventure. Ours was anyway. Perhaps more than making a nuclear power plant that is also a collective work.

Is there a link between your last three albums: Catharsis, on the post-attack period, O you, human brothers, adaptation of a novel by Albert Cohen, and indelible ?

Catharsis, it is the urgency to overcome the amazement, to take the head out of the hole. Cohen's adaptation is to understand where the evil comes from that men sometimes carry with them; to be in someone's footsteps to draw what's going on in the body. indelible is a positive book even if it speaks of the past. He is not nostalgic. He is there to make us understand what we have experienced. It was obviously difficult to draw Cabu, Tignous or Wolinski, to review the photos, to immerse myself in the archives. indelible is also there for those who stay.

What is your future made of?

After January 7th, I ran everywhere on a sloping ground. It was going too fast. I now want to have time. To see me again draw. My next album, Hollywood liar, is interested in filming Misfits [Les Désaxés] with Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe. The atmosphere is quite deadly, it's a movie about the end of a certain Hollywood. The big challenge for me is to draw Marilyn angry. I have not succeeded yet. There is no picture of her mouthing. I want to hear her moan, she who would probably have had something to say about #MeToo. We can make an entire album for a single drawing.

What is then the drawing ofindelible ?

Page 155: Everyone is trying to draw Pierre Arditi. It's obviously Cabu who gets there. Charb, Tignous, Riss, Catherine [Meurisse] and I am behind him, we look at his drawing and we are laughing.

indelible, by Luz. Futuropolis, 320 p., 24 €.