Trondheim is also the birthplace of Hal Foster’s medieval hero Prince Valiant and is also used at least twice in classic Monty Python sketches, for example as the hometown of the Vikings in the Spam sketch and the setting on one record album track for a traditional folk dance where the inhabitants hit each other regularly sticks. In the end, though, he has assured me that he chose the name mainly to avoid sounding at all French and to be tricky for French people to pronounce. In other words, to be deliberately awkward.

So what woke Lewis out of his shell and got him started? He was asked to contribute to Jeux d’Influences (Editions PLG, Paris, 2001), a book in which thirty bande dessinée creators wrote about which key works had inspired them to take up comics, and which had inspired them to continue. Trondheim responded, characteristically in his own non-conformist way, with a modest one-page, fixed-shot strip. He draws himself back in 1987, opening and reading his first copy of the experimental comics collection Les Lynx a Tifs. Bemused by the bizarre art styles, he decides to read it anyway, after all “I’ve paid for it”, and plumps for “one of the worst” by Matt Kontture. The last of the next three silent panels of him reading marks Trondheim’s deadpan, blank-eyed epiphany. It comes to him as a quiet, intellectual revelation: “Right… that’s drawn really badly but it’s interesting to read.” “That’s strange.” “Well, in that case, even I could make comics if I wanted to.” “OK, yes… all I have to do is try.”

And try he did. You might think he would have settled for being strictly a writer, only sketching layouts for his scripts for others to illustrate, as for example the late Archie Goodwin used to do. Instead, Lewis taught himself to draw in public, undertaking a mad, mammoth self-challenge, to improvise a black and white, 500-page, 6,000-panel story, Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie (L’Association/Le Lézard, Paris, 1992), making it up as he went along, much as Moebius had done serializing The Airtight Garage in the early Metal Hurlant magazines from 1975. Page by page you can watch Trondheim’s fresh, direct, economical cartoon style emerging and his confidence and sheer pleasure in discovering he can tell whatever story he wants growing before your very eyes. He started detailing buildings, interiors and street scenes in a loose clear line like a wobbly Hergé, while the facial expressions and body language of his Candide-like leading rabbit Lapinot and company acquired much of the vitality of Charles Schulz or Carl Barks. Trondheim has never re-read all this epic since and it doesn’t entirely stand up, except as an inspiring lesson in comics self-education and as a blueprint for things to come. Like Barks in his timeless Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge fables, one of Trondheim’s childhood passions, he too uses ‘unrealistic’ funny animals, rather than human beings, but makes us empathize with them for their all-too human foibles and contradictions. Lapinot might seem very rabbit-like with expressive, mobile ears and a penchant for carrots and hopping in his big bare feet, but otherwise he is a good-hearted, Tintin-like young man, the conflict and comedy usually springing from his less than reliable crony Richie the cat and his foil Doug the dog.