Behind the Comics VI - Olive Booger

In his autobiographic comics for š! #11 'artventurous' Olive Booger gave a gripping personal insight into his horrifying experience of participating in performance art. Now we asked him to tell us a bit about the process of creating this comics. If you are unfamiliar with Olive Booger, here's a short bio and his self-portrait:

Olive Booger was born 1982 in the banlieu of Paris and grew up in an ambiance à la Riad Sattouf. In 2006 he graduated from the Arts Déco in Strasbourg in video and comic arts. Since 2003 he self-publishes his Saltie Booger zines, contributes to international anthologies and last year his first graphic novel I like Short Songs was published. His comics have also appeared in Kuš! #6 and #7. He currently lives in Paris and works as illustrator and comic artist.

You can read some of his comics online at grandpapier, visit his beautiful boogers etsy shop and also follow him on blogspot, twitter and tumblr.

But let's read his report of how he created the artventurous š! story:

Before an artist starts working on a piece, he has to show some adventurous spirit, he has to open up to the world so he can get his inspiration: the raw material for his creations. For that reason, I studied in art school. I encountered weird artists there, as well as students discovering complete freedom after years of high school frustration.

 

I decided to pay tribute to the nice times I had with these people in my sad and lonely medium of expression - comics.


Now how did I proceed ?  

For a few minutes my brain mixed thoughts and memories, trying to figure something out. A draft of a story finally occurred in my mind and I wrote it down in my sketchbook.

Yeah, that’s what the inside of my messy brains looks like.  

Then I passed my sketchbook on to my assistant, Jean-Luc, so that he decodes it all. In his younger days Jean-Luc used to spend 3 hours a day on the Minitel (french ancestor of the internet), so no need to say he is an ace with computers. That’s why he uses a USB pen tablet to make layouts/write/draw the story on his screen.

The file is then sent to Olga, a charming housewife I met at the municipal drawing classes. She redraws the pages on paper with a pencil for me, she’s such a sweetheart.

 

Olga’s wonderful work then goes to Manfred’s hands. Manfred is a former new-age drummer from Munich, who had just been fired from his band when I hired him. Manfred inks the pages in black.
 

You may notice that Manfred likes to reshape drawings to give them a trippier aspect, that’s why he sometimes overuses that “distorting finger” tool in photoshop before getting down to work.  

Once Manfred’s task is complete, I just add bits of text here and there and take the finished black and white plates to the local primary school, where little kids will color the pages with Crayolas while they’re waiting for their mums to pick them up at 4:30 pm.

Here we go! The reading artventure is ready to start!


Olive told us that the first image is actually a picture from a show by Jean-Louis Costes, a trashy Parisian performer/writer/singer/video-maker whom he liked a lot at the time and still likes. Unfortunately he doesn't have photos from the actual perfomance he attended, but why look at photos, when there is a comics! So read the finished story in š! #11 'artventurous' and visit Olive's website!

Behind the comics will continue next Tuesday with a look behind the artventurous comics of Jean de Wet.