Broken Frontier

Micrographica, the new book from Renée French, is "Hot Off The Press!" at Top Shelf Productions. Developed from an online strip French wrote as comic relief while writing The Ticking, Micrographica is a hilarious tale of tiny rodents. French has also been invited to contribute to an exhibit in the Louvre – the museum’s museum – opening in November. She recently chatted with Broken Frontier about her work and the Louvre exhibit.

BROKEN FRONTIER:  I heard your work will be included in an exhibit in the Louvre this fall!  How awesome is that?

RENÉE FRENCH: It's at the MUSEE DES ARTS DECORATIFS which is in a wing of the LOUVRE, in the gallery that is part of the toy section of the museum. Yeah, I'm pretty psyched and shocked to be part of it.

BF:  What role did you play in curating your part of the exhibit?  Did you get to participate in the selection of samples?  Which of your works will be represented?

RF:  It's an incredibly thought out exhibition, called "Toy Comix" co-curated by JC Menu from the French publisher L'Association and Dorothee Charles, curator of the Toy Department of the Musee Des Arts Decoratifs.   The artists all had the same guidelines.  We each had to produce three pages involving the toy of our choice from the museum's collection.

Some of the other artists in the show are Jim Woodring, Thomas Ott, Max Andersson, Anke Feuchtenberger, and Tom Gauld.  I chose a velvet duck with wooden wheels for my story and I think Jim picked a frog with a guitar.  I can't wait to see what everyone came up with.

BF:  Some people have expressed a concern that museum and gallery exhibits of comic art dilute its quality  because wall-mounted exhibits of selected panels remove those panels from their narrative context - in effect concealing the story-telling quality of the art. 

How do you view this problem?  Do you think something of your art is lost when individual panels are shown out of the context of the story?  In the same vein, what benefit do you see from museum and gallery exhibits of comic art?

RF:   In this case, in the "Toy Comix" exhibition, all of the pages will be on display in order and they are complete stories so I guess you could walk around the show and read 17 stories on your way around the gallery space.  The pages will all be published in a book by L'Association. But yeah, I agree that showing stand alone panels out of context can be a problem.  Most of the artwork I've shown in galleries are stand alone images meant for exhibition.  I have however shown chapters from The Ticking in a couple shows and I try to choose a segment of the book that will work on its own as a story.

BF:  Can we chat a bit about your creative process?

RF:  Sure.

BF: There's such a contrast between The Ticking and Micrographica, which I understand you worked on at the same time.  The Ticking is imaginative, textured, compelling, and has the look of something that was almost consuming in both conception and execution.  Micrographica seems much more spontaneous (but still imaginative and compelling). 

How did you feel while working on them?  Were they complementary projects, or did you find yourself longing for one while working on the other?

RF:  Yeah, there's a huge contrast between those two books.  The Ticking was emotionally and physically draining to work on and I felt a constant pull to stay in control of it.  Micrographica was something I was doing to sort of give me a break from the heavy material in The Ticking.   I'd do a chapter of Micrographica to be posted online, on
Serializer, to make my husband, my friends, and yeah, myself laugh. It was for fun and a few people seemed to like it.  Then I'd get back to The Ticking.  

True, Micrographica is probably the most spontaneous story I've ever done.  I didn't feel pressure to do something with any emotional weight and was mainly just writing a comedy for fun.

BF:  What is your work space like?

RF:  A mess.  Here, in California, my studio is a small room in the house, big mushy chair, stuff on the walls by Dave Cooper, Scott Teplin, Jeremy Tinder, prints and a flippy clock by Yoshitomo Nara (major crush), Anke Feuchtenberger and photos of goats and sheep and marsupials, dead bugs, and Buzz Aldrin.  Too many books and my Mac.

It's a tight space and I work sitting in the chair with a drawing board on my lap, a diet coke and my electric pencil sharpener next to me.  Oh yeah, a tiny Sony Trinitron TV on top of a filing cabinet with a diagram of the layout of the grounds of Towcester Lodge for the book I'm working on now tacked up on the side of it.

In Sydney my studio is airy and I've got a small terrace looking out at the city and I work on a desk in front of my computer.  The walls only have a few things, Tom Gauld, Shelley Burnham, Jeremy Tinder, Durer insects, and Steve McQueen on his motorcycle in The Great Escape.

That was way too detailed, wasn't it? [Laughing]

BF:  Not at all, I love workspace descriptions! Let's talk about Micrographica.  Is it suitable for all ages?  I have a good friend who's 10 years old, and she's always on the lookout for comics by women.  Is this a book I could read with her?

RF:  It depends on the 10 year old, or the 10 year old's parents. There's quite a bit of swearing in the book.  It's dialogue heavy and some of the stuff that made me laugh the most was the filthy mouth on Moe.  It's not intended for a younger audience but if a parent thinks it's ok, cool.

BF:  The title implies that the drawings are really small.  How will they look in the book?  Will they all be tiny?

RF:  The originals are roughly a centimeter square drawn with an ink pen with a tiny nib. I drew them that small so that I couldn't go crazy with detail the way I naturally do.  They were scanned at high resolution and for online we blew them up to about 2.5 to 3 inches square. 

So, that's about the size the drawings are in the book version.   There are some drawings in the portrait section of the book that are in that pencil style I like to use and some extras, like guest drawings of poop by my friends and siblings.

BF:  The small size, and the simplicity of the drawings, really add to the humor.  I laughed out loud when I saw the first panel.  Do you find that it's easier to be funny when you keep the drawings more spare, less detailed?

RF:  The drawings are awkward in a way because it's hard to draw that small, so the characters have a funny simplistic look to them and sometimes the spazziest drawings are the funniest.  Yeah, absolutely.

BF:  There really is quite a contrast between the art of The Ticking, and the art of Micrographica.  I really love it that you've gone for so much variety in your style.  What's next?

RF:  The next book coming out is Edison Steelhead's Lost Portfolio: Exploratory Studies of Girls and Rabbits published by Sparkplug and coming out for this year's San Diego Comicon.  It's a collection of my portraits of girls and rabbits with various deformities, prosthetics, surgical scars, equipment and costumes.  All of these drawings were in gallery shows in NYC and Tokyo except for two which were commissions. All but a couple of the drawings are sold, so this is a way of putting them together in one place. They're drawn with sepia pencil on paper.

Now I'm working on my book project for Picturebox called Towcester Lodge , that I can't talk much about.  It will contain tons of drawings, etchings, writing and some of my black and white photography. 

Check out Micrographica and The Ticking at Top Shelf Productions .