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At the meeting of graphic design and comics, The color of things, by Martin Panchaud, reinvents with talent the codes of the ninth art. A new language to tell the adventures of a teenager who confronts the violence of the world…

Par
Minh Tran Huy

Posted on 04/09/2023 at 06:00

With The color of things, Martin Panchaud signs a formidable comic strip which won the Fauve d’or for best album at the Angoulême Festival. The plot is reminiscent of Ken Loach and the animated series South Park : we follow Simon, chubby English teenager bullied by peers, who finds himself at the head of a jackpot of sixteen million pounds and is forced to flee… But all the originality of the book is that it is drawn entirely from a bird’s eye view, with characters reduced to colored circles, and punctuated with diagrams, infographics and pictograms borrowing from cartography and video games. Interview with a formal experimenter in the tradition of Chris Ware, coupled with an extraordinary storyteller.

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Madame Figaro . – You were a dyslexic child. Did this play a role in your graphic language?
Martin Panchaud.– I understood it in the aftermath. I spent a long time trying to decipher the texts, then I fell into comics by chance, and then I found myself faced with images that I could understand and manipulate – which was impossible with letters. It was foundational. From there, I studied graphic design which taught me synthesis, minimalism, the fact of going to the essential. My style was born from the meeting of graphic design and comic. I took hold of this language, telling myself that I wanted to take it elsewhere, to find its borders, its limits, like a new territory to explore.

The sets and objects are almost characters in this comic strip…
All the objects that surround us have been manufactured and must have been drawn one day. We live within an immense library of data. Let’s take the choco-muffin that appears in the book: we have its identity card with its ingredients, its weight, its additives… I wanted to describe our environment by the mental use we make of it, and that works. Readers understand that a space can be traced in planes and that a plane is a place. We were brought up like that: we are used to reading maps and data. Then, I like to draw from science to bring it back into art. I want to understand the mechanics of things and expose them to readers. Thus, when I say that in boxing you have to hit the liver, I have to know where this organ is located and why it is not protected.

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You were a child apart, like Simon, your hero?
The autobiographical part of The color of things is due to this character outside the system, who becomes an orphan and confronts massive institutions – the homes, the police, the doctors, the shrinks – who regard him with little empathy. As a dyslexic, I too had to deal with specialists who spoke to me in a vacuum and understood neither my needs nor my specificities. I was also put on the margins at school, seen as a dunce. As a teenager, I frequented the bad guys a lot because of this. In reality, there is a lot of goodwill in everyone, and it’s a bit of life’s misfortune that makes you more or less harsh, more or less violent.