The last day of Angoulême was fun. Not as crazy but still busier than any convention sunday I've ever been to. Got my picture taken with the rest of the Organic Comix crew.
Said goodbye to Chris Pitzer. We'll always have Angoulême. Drove through the countryside with Reed Man and Elodie where I was going to spend a week at their house and maybe work on a new comics project together. Reed Man said how he struggles to understand me when I speak. He said he understands English people perfectly, but the American accent is really difficult for him. He said whenever Chris and I would speak to each other it was incomprehensible. I jokingly asked what if I speak in an English accent. I put on a very arch accent à la James Mason. They laughed but said that it really was a lot easier. Ha ha. Went back to my normal Philly accent. I can only imagine how impenetrable the Pittsburgh accent would be. As the five hour drive progressed and I grew frustrated with my inability to make myself understood, I thought, what the hell, and started talking in an English accent. Somewhere in the vicinity of Anne Hathaway's fake English accent. And all the language gap problems disappeared. It really was magical. If Chris had been there, or any other American, I would've been horrifyingly embarrassed. But the English accent thing worked wonders. Now I don't need to learn to speak french. Okay. My resolution is to learn french by the time I make my next trip.
On the ride back Reed Man got a text saying that the Fantax archival volume he worked on lost to a Donald Duck reprint at the Angoulême awards. "Fuck Donald Duck!" Reed Man is what Kirby would call a "weirdie." He's got a huge collection of art and comics, all kinds of Kirbyania. He showed me the oversized French language collection of Captain Victory, which is amazing. And the hardcover of Kirby's The Black Hole comics. He promised to pick me up copies of this and the CV volume the next time he sees them. He said the Kirby Black Hole volume is a sign of things to come. Nowhere in the book does it mention Jack Kirby. It says "By Walt Disney." Now that Disney owns Marvel, Reed believes there will come a day when "The Coming of Galactus" or whatever will have Kirby's name nowhere to be seen and just a Walt Disney signature in the corner.
He was showing me various unfinished projects he was working on. This one really caught my eye, a comic made up almost entirely of Kirby collage that he started, but never finished back in the '90s. Most of Kirby's work was published in cheap black and white reprint volumes in France, so it was a lot easier to put together a collage like this. I don't think they've ever done a Devil Dinosaur or 2001 black-and-white Essentials volume here in the states.
It's kind of an insane piece. I like the name "Big Dick" for a comics character and am surprised no one else has come up with that yet.
Delcourt editor Thierry Mornet asked me if I could draw a pin-up of a character he created for a Marvel contest when he was a child. The character's name is Le Garde and his secret headquarters is under Notre Dame Cathedral. Reed Man did the colors.
Tom Scioli is the author of American Barbarian and the co-creator of Godland.
