Pascal Valty

Tell us about your beginnings, your passion for comics ?

My first comics must date from when I was about 6 or 7 years old, I was reading Pif Gadget, Scrooge Parade... I wanted to do the same. I stopped at the Arts Déco school when I was made to understand that it was worse than a STD.

How is a comic book made?

You need paper, a pencil and a story, ideally a silly one.

What are the steps?

It's better to do the pencils before the inking, then the text is done when you want but preferably in the speech balloons.

How is a comic book made?

Alone or with someone, it depends on the subject, the context... beyond that, it's like in love relationships, it becomes complicated. On the other hand, when it comes to editing, it's always a team effort.

Learning to draw is an Everest, telling a story is something else, how do you learn that?

I have always drawn, like all children, it is the first written language. Later, there are those who stop, and those who make comics. Writing is the Bible, comics is Lascaux, personally I'm more Lascaux, only the phylacteries are missing... Here, I've already told the beginning of a story, it's not more complicated than that.

What are your masters of the genre?

There are so many, Bretecher, Reiser, Trondheim, Sattouf, Larcenet, Fred, Morris, Hergé, Fabcaro, Edika, Pellos, Goscinny, Franquin, Gotlib... But if I had to remember only one, I would say the Barbapapas, for the years of peace they offered me by occupying my children.

Is there a life discipline for the cartoonist?

It's a very solitary job. At the time of the confinement, many people discovered another life stuck at home, whereas it had always been my daily life. I think it made me happy, like a feeling of finally sharing my life in slippers with the rest of the planet.

Your job requires an eagle eye, a perfidious ear, a radar for commonplaces, you have to work on these things?

Of course, it becomes second nature, everyday life is an extraordinary breeding ground. Besides, if I were a Buddhist, I would be very afraid of being reincarnated as a sponge.

Doctor Valty, I don't laugh anymore. Why?

Because you have lost your childish soul. It is the characteristic of the adult to be boring, the proof, when a politician has a little bit of humor, we reproach him. Our society is dying of this.

Doctor Valty, I laugh too much, is it wrong?

This is the other side of the coin. By always wanting to be funny, we sometimes end up being a drag.

Humor seems less and less shared, almost communitarian. And you, who is your community ?

There is nothing more personal than humor, often the distance between laughter and embarrassment is counted in microns. Especially when you play a lot with the second degree. If I talk to you about Jewish humor, trash humor or jihadist humor, it's obvious that you're not going to make the same people laugh (for the last group, I'm not even sure there's a humor or else very, very dark. Personally, decapitation is my limit)

Humor is the outlet of a nation, the expression of its morale; your mission seems to be of primary importance, of public health perhaps?

Humor is often the best way to defuse a tense situation precisely because it appeals to the intelligence of the other, the ability to find a common territory. Trump is an outstanding humorist, the problem is that he doesn't know it.