The Master of the seasons (I)

A TIME TO SOW (AN IDEA THAT GERMINATES)

A universal language

‘Hey Alain, do you realise that you are one of the few people who are fluent in a language understood in any lingo on the planet, even by those who can’t read?’

‘Eh? Who? Me? How’s that...?’

‘Through pictures! You fattie: pictures!’

‘I’m not fat!!!’

My conscience is getting to me (you're witnesses: all it ever does is go on at me about my weight!!!)

So I think up a story without words which sums up, exclusively in pictures, the heart of the Bible’s message. I set to work...(compared to a white whale, I’m even …..downright ultra slim!!!!)

A TIME TO GROW

The twinkle in Doc's eyes

I almost forget the realities that surround me during the weeks that this stage of the creative process lasts. All my heart beats for now is this quest. Totally absorbed in the task, I scarcely sleep more than 4 hours a night and geta boost from shots of pure adrenaline, drawn straight from the cask of this all-consuming passion...

Only once the sketch I am working on is finished do I lift my nose from my drawing board. (Well I never, are there people around me?)...

And, as in the film “Back to the Future”, in the manner of Doctor Emmett Brown in his moments of ecstatic creativity, crazed, I grab a passer-by to show him my drawing. Without any further explanations.

I watch his facial features attentively while he is reading, and if I detect him pulling the slightest grimace of incomprehension, I snatch the sketch from his hands, leave him high and dry with his questions, to return straightaway to my drawing board in order to think up a more comprehensible scenario.

WINTER TIME (WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS)

‘I’ve fiiiiiinished!’...

This is what I used to shout as a child on the potty when I had finished doing my business… But here, once my work is finished, (er….the comparison stops there, okay!?), there’s silence, no-one comes…

I find myself alone with my comic book.

It’s as if a workman had failed to turn up to finish the job.

Didn’t he hear the call? Doesn’t he feel up to it? Might that be you? How can we now get this little book without words into the hands of the potential target audience?

If you would like to see the little book without words, click here.

The Spanish example

This isn't the first time that this situation has happened to me…..

I was filled with a strong surge of love for Spanish-speaking peoples, to the point of being moved to tears for them. (Is it serious, doctor?) A love like that could only come to me from above! (Personally, I have nothing of that kind in stock.) I therefore put a crazy amount of energy into translating my comic book "Conventional Wisdom"*1 into Spanish using my pure line of descent to help me out (friends, family, etc...) and once it was finished: NOTHING.

I didn't know what to do with the book. I put it away in a drawer in the workshop alongside my hopes for it, and I moved on to something else.

If you would like to see this book, Conventional Wisdom, click here.

DIY

How are we now going to get this little book without words into people’s hands?

I benefit from having a small network within the French-speaking world, but not a Spanish one as yet, let alone a global one…..

Not content to stop there, I decide to don, for a while, the guise of another: that of a prospector.

Part 2 (of 4) next week