Words Without Borders — “the online magazine for international literature” — spotlights graphic novels from around the world in their February issue. The issue includes comic strips from around the world by Philippe Dupuy, the co-winner of the Grand Prize at this year’s Angoulême International Comics Festival; Cho Pyŏng Kwŏn; Mazen Kerbaj; and many more.
They also have an interview Gipi, whose Garage Band and Notes for a War Story were published in English by First Second last year:
NR: Has your style changed since you first began drawing comics?
GIPI: Well, I change style whenever I start a new book. It’s like the form and style of drawings are “inside” the story, and they come out only with the first drawings of the first page. Often, I do some kind of study before starting the work, but the studies are always useless, because the drawings change in the first scene on the page.
For Notes for a War Story, I started drawing without any idea of what I was doing. I did the first fourteen pages by improvising completely. I didn’t study the characters. After fourteen pages, I told myself there was a story there, and some good characters too, but I didn’t know too much about it. So I stopped for a month and tried to discover if I felt a motivation inside me to tell this story. And I found it. Only after that did I write a real script. Again, I changed a lot on the pages. I really love . . . well, I’m a slave, of improvisation.
Gipi’s next book is “a really crazy puzzle of stories taken from my life—and a part with a pirate.”
