Behind the Comics XVII - L.L. de Mars

L.L. de Mars contributed a comic to š! #15 'Cats' and gives a little look behind his desk, telling about his process.

L.L. de Mars // *1967, France. Lives and works in a very very small village. Playing the clarinet allows him not to draw comics; writing essays on Italian painting allows him not to play the clarinet; making animation movies allows him not to write essays; teaching medieval theology allows him not to make any cartoons; making documentaries allows him not to teach; painting frescoes allows him not to film anything. Thanks to all these methods, he can find time to sleep... Visit: www.le-terrier.net

L.L. de Mars: Each new story moves my work into new modes; the forms taken by the work itself must be regarded more as a speculative way I want to bend it than as a functional couple "right shape for right project." 

These choices can be arbitrary (there may be no evidence of meaning between the mode of work and the nature of the story in progress), which gives the working method the power to drive the narrative in unexpected areas. 

For the story made here for Kuš!, I decided to build a bank of visual waste (old prints randomly taken, anthropological documents, military manuals) that will revolve around the central text (an excerpt from "Jacques le fataliste et son maître" of D. Diderot) as electrons around a nucleus. No sketches, work in direct color subjected to chance: four cups are filled with four pigments by page, among which there is one black and one white. The brush runs from a cup to an other one, corrupting colors gradually . 

Some more free drawings appear between these images as a cement between nonadjusted stones. 

The base was prepared by prints of "Krazy Kat" with trichlorethylene. These prints may appear or disappear, depending on the space required for the other drawings. The pages are composed like Gothic altarpieces, with a predella devoted to Felix the Cat. 

The set also revolves on an axis situated in the center of the upper-side grid, flipping, during the story, the general form that squares draw together. This form evokes the "T" that separated the world into three continents on globes painted in the low Middle Ages.

The finished comic by L.L. de Mars you can read in š! #15 'Cats'. If you like to learn more about his process, we recommend you to watch this film about his work. A silent movie, done when he realized the book 'Hapax' published by Hoochie Coochie:



Next week 'Behind the Comics' continues with an insight to the work by Singaporean artist Pixin!