August 1976, in Finistère. Jean-Louis Tripp, 18, is having a pleasant family vacation. A stay marked by the terrible tragedy of the death of his youngest brother Gilles. He was hit by a driver who fled, leaving him inanimate and bleeding on the road. He will die a few hours later. He was 11 years old. Forty-five years later, the General Store cartoonist returns in The Little Brother to the tragedy of the brutal death of a loved one who had his whole life ahead of him. “You don’t die at eleven,” the author is indignant at the announcement of his brother’s death.
How to represent the intangible pain, the devastation, the guilt, the irreparable? Through the exploration of his memories, Jean-Louis Tripp has created a moving work, deploying prodigious graphic virtuosity to translate the indescribable into images. “I knew what I was going to tell in the book, the script was all mapped out. On the other hand, the question that I tirelessly asked myself was how. I thought a lot about the form, about the means offered to me by the comic strip to convey all these emotions”, confides the designer.
For two years, the author restored his memory. He retraces the affliction, the anger, the disarray, the leaden silence which followed the disappearance of his little brother. He found the words he needed, forty-five years ago to share the experience of mourning. “Like a surgeon who cuts the flesh with a scalpel and who dives into the depths, I wanted to see what we are made of deep down, to find what builds us”.
“This book stood out. I did it in some kind of emergency. There were moments of intense emotion, of course. But not the abysses of forty years ago. On the contrary, it was rather a soothing balm on the pains of the past. And even as a sweetness to have frequented my little brother for two years”, writes the author in the afterword of the album. Jean-Louis Tripp likes to compare his approach with the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which consists of repairing an object with gold powder. “I wanted to give memories a second life, repair them with gold.. .”.
And his story celebrates all the virtues of comics. His smoky line captures the expression of a look or a posture, in all their nuance. With brilliance, the author celebrates the variety of framings, of the staging, between alternating silent, but so eloquent full boards, exploded and tighter pages. So many resources brilliantly used by Jean-Louis Tripp to perpetuate the memory of Gilles in majesty.
The comic box
“This board is nine months after the accident, when the trial of the driver must take place. My father, who was not present at the time of the tragedy, wanted me to take him to the site of the accident so that he could collect himself,” recounts Jean-Louis Tripp.
“To tell that moment, I drew this scene with fog to illustrate this ghostly atmosphere that reigned at that moment and underline the state of devastation of my father. This scene I do not remember. I remembered it when I started preparing the trial footage. Memory reveals itself.
Here the author puts himself on the stage, recounting the facts in the face of his mute and grief-stricken father: “This discrepancy between the very factual aspect of my remarks and the attitude of my father, his eyes completely lost in the void , highlights its state of devastation. Something in my father’s gaze was definitively extinguished on August 5, 1976. This gaze, I made it more intense than in reality. In general, I am particularly attentive to the play of the characters, to their posture, their expressiveness.
The lightly colored wash of the plate composes most of the tonality of the album: “The grays are slightly tinged with red, evoking a somewhat cloudy color that emanates from the past. This shade softens the colder look of pure gray and makes the point. »
