Could you give us a little preview of the story?

It’s about having a good time with your family and surviving your family at the same time. You can like being with them, but at the same time you are who you are, and with a little house and a little car, everyone is trying to manage, trying to find their place. There are two sets of parents, four kids, different ages, different personalities, different life situations.

There are three volumes out in French at the moment. How many are you planning to put out?

We’re planning more. The story goes on, it’s definitely not finished yet. It’s not a chronological story, so you can either pick the first volume of the third volume, you don’t have to read the first volume first. You start to get familiar with the characters and then you really get to know them in the other volumes.

Which elements do you find the most interesting to draw? Is it the characters, the nature, the city (as in the case of Vice Squad, where the events took place in Paris)?

Absolutely the characters. For me the most important thing is the motion of the book, what you are talking about, what you are trying to explain to the others. As an artist when I work with the characters, I like to think of them as real people. I try to get to know them, to learn as much as possible about them, to hear their voices, to feel their emotions, and that’s how I get to know their universe. And then I move on to everything else. The scene, the shot, it all revolves around the characters.

When you create your characters, do you find inspiration around you or are they a complete work of your imagination?

It depends. With Glorious Summers, I had to get to know the family at different ages, from the very beginning when the kids are just babies to when they’re all grown up. We’re talking like 30 years of life. And I was forced from the beginning to know the physical and emotional evolution of the characters. So in order to do that, to paint a bigger picture, I picked different people from my life: my father is there, my sister and my daughter are there. On the other hand, as I was talking before about the personal link, there is a lot of myself, emotionally, in the main character of Vice Squad. I had to understand him and what one would do in such a different situation. So I tried to put myself in his shoes.