“A PERFECT SITUATION FOR MAKING ALL KINDS OF MISTAKES”: A TALK WITH PIERRE LA POLICE

As you might expect from an artist who uses a pseudonym, Pierre La Police prefers to let his work speak for itself. And he’s got an impressively varied body of work to do the talking for him: Since starting out in the indie arts scene in France in the 1990s, La Police has made paintings, video installations, sculptures, as well as some of the most hilariously absurd comics I’ve ever encountered. 

When I first came across La Police’s work, in the form of his comics series Masters of the Nefarious (Les Praticiens de L’Infernel in French), I was thoroughly impressed by his command of tone and his ability to create a comedic world that, though absurd, was still anchored by a coherent logic of its own. The series also made me laugh out loud. Translating Masters gave me an even deeper appreciation for the precision of his language and the wealth of pitch-perfect details in his images, and made me curious to know more about him.

Though he still likes to keep the focus on his work, La Police was good enough to take the time to answer a few questions about his influences, his process, and his background. This interview was conducted in French, via email, and then translated.

-Luke Burns

Action Things 12 (gouache, 2015)

LUKE BURNS: When you were growing up, did you read comics regularly? Were there any authors or titles-- French, American, or other-- that influenced you or that you particularly liked? 

PIERRE LA POLICE: I read a lot of comics when I was young: French and Belgian classics, Italian “Fumetti,” DC and Marvel Comics, as well as other American authors, like Ernie Bushmiller and later Roy Crane. In this latter group, I particularly liked Lee Falk and Jack Kirby, who certainly contributed to shaping my creative imagination. 

As a child I traced a lot of American comics that had been released in French editions. But even though I was tracing them, my superheroes came out a little ridiculous, with muscles that were too big and poorly drawn. Ever since, I’ve maintained a taste for this awkwardness, which I’ve since cultivated intentionally: Faulty perspectives, hands drawn backwards, big noses…

Who were your comedic influences?

Today, you need only go online or turn on your television to have access to a plethora of comedy series and stand-up specials, but when I was young, sources of comedy were much rarer, and were sadly conventional. The things that made me laugh often were not intentionally comedic: The cliches of the popular culture in which I was immersed, above all, television, in its most outrageous aspects.

Additionally, I maintain an attentive relationship with my own idiocy and let it guide me in the creative process. It’s a way to recycle everything that relates to defective perception, approximation, and misunderstandings. 

Are there any contemporary comedic artists, actors, or writers whose work you enjoy?

I can’t answer this question without mentioning the comedic duo Laurel and Hardy. Their films are a century old and still make me laugh. I particularly appreciate their comedic style, revolving around collapse, in which a minor detail sets off a spiral of chaos that increases until everything falls apart. A pessimist would say that this is the way all of history works.

I don’t have the time to watch everything that gets made today, but some of the slightly older shows that I liked a lot were the British shows The IT Crowd and Steve Coogan’s series with his Alan Partridge character. The Canadian series Trailer Park Boys made me laugh a lot. On the American side, I really relished the cringe comedy of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, as well as the classics Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m forgetting a lot, but I can’t leave out Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy as well as the series Eastbound & Down.

What made you choose to use a pseudonym? 

I never felt any desire to put myself in the spotlight, and feel more comfortable in the background, behind my creations. It allows me, as well as my work, to live and evolve more freely, including in the imaginations of the people who read my work. I find it’s more interesting to forgo context so as not to muddy the reading with elements that are external to it.

And what made you pick the name, “Pierre La Police”?

When I started circulating my drawings, I took this pseudonym because I found it was working towards the same ends as the drawings. Its goal was to grab the attention and to inspire a quest for meaning that was destined to remain unfulfilled. You should know that in French, the word “police” is also a typographical term that refers to the collection of characters of a complete and coherent language. (Translator’s Note: That is, it’s another word for a typeface or font.)

Dancing with Figueroa de Bahia (ink on Typex, 1995)

A number of your early works were zines that you self-published in small editions. What drew you to that approach to publishing and distributing your work?

I started publishing my own books at a very young age. As luck would have it, I lived just a few steps away from the bookstore “Un Regard Moderne” in Paris. It was run by the legendary Jacques Noël who offered the best and the most important selection of self-published works and also rare and foreign books. It’s where I discovered Art Spiegelman’s Raw, and the singular universes of artists like Charles Burns and Mark Beyer, among others. 

The discovery and the exploration of this underground graphic scene in all its diversity was truly a catalyst. The zine form became the ideal medium for circulating my work because for the general public at the time, the internet might as well not have existed. My first collections were printed on photocopiers and had runs of between fifty and one hundred copies. To produce an appealing object with a minimum of resources, one is obliged to ask all kinds of questions and to be attentive to details, which made it an excellent school for learning the rudiments of publishing and a perfect situation for making all kinds of mistakes.

Could you describe some of these self-published zines? How did you distribute them and how were they received by readers?

Alongside my Masters of the Nefarious stories, I was simultaneously working on another series titled Les Nouvelles Marionnettes Thermiques (“The New Thermal Marionettes”). It was about a small group of flying heads equipped with abstract technology who fought against monsters according to a narrative framework that was always identical and played out in six images. These characters appeared many times in my zines. One zine collected a bunch of their adventures and was printed on tracing paper that was just thick enough to let you see the page underneath and to accentuate the very jittery style of the series’ drawings, but didn’t impede the reading of the story. I put out this collection in two different formats, one very small, and one very big. Sometimes readers couldn’t choose, and ultimately took both of them. These zines were produced in a very artisanal way, and because there weren’t many of them, people lent them to each other a lot. I only had one point of distribution, Un Regard Moderne bookstore. At the time, I wasn’t very careful about archiving my work and I didn’t know to keep copies of some of these publications for myself.

Les Nouvelles Marionnettes Thermiques (zine, 1994)

How did you make the transition between zines and publications with a larger readership? 

I gave a large portion of those zines to my friends, because they were my first audience. One of them regularly brought them into the magazine he wrote for, and one day he told me, “Hey, everybody in the editorial department likes your drawings and they want to publish you.” That’s how I started to work for Les Inrockuptibles. 

Was it a big change?

It was a massive surprise for me because I thought that my stories would only make me and my circle of close friends laugh. It was an incredible feeling to realize that it was possible to share this very personal form of writing with a wider audience, and that they appeared to be receptive to what I was doing without me having to change anything. Afterwards I started to receive commissions from other publications and this opened the door to all sorts of collaborations that taught me a lot.

Your use of language and choice of words is so precise in your work. What is your process like when you’re revising your prose and looking for the right word?

It’s true, when I start drawing a story, the script is written to a T, and each sentence, each word has been worked over until I’ve found the right resonance. I really like playing with the different registers we are exposed to every day: The language of the media, publicity, marketing, as well as all kinds of specialized jargon. For a long time, I’ve cultivated lists of words and phrases relating to areas ranging from notary law and the argot of wrestlers, to the terminology of different sectarian movements and the field of industrial chemicals. It’s a source I can draw from for writing, which is why you’ll find in my sentences words that are malformed, mixed together, or invented, a real nightmare for a translator.

Are there sentences and words in English, or in any other languages on these lists? Are there any words or sentences that you particularly like that you haven’t yet had the opportunity to use?

There are a few English words and sentences in my lists of linguistic fermentation, but many will never see the light of day. What’s interesting is that when a word or a sequence of words on my list finds its place in a wider group and enters into a resonance with that group, then it can be made use of, but before that moment it’s nothing but an unlit wick. I suppose lots of writers work like this. A few years ago, I discovered Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book: A collection of ideas, images, and words that could be used as a spark for, or as elements of, more developed stories. In browsing through this book, I felt a sort of familiarity with this literary object, which was conceived above all as a personal tool for work.

Parpalate (zines, 2023)

How would you describe the tone of the narrator, or the character of the narrator, of Masters of the Nefarious?

In my series Masters of the Nefarious, as you have quite rightly remarked, the narrator is a character in his own right even though we never see him. He seems to uncover the story at the same time as the reader and is surprised by the twists and turns in the tale in a somewhat stupid manner, he often understands things well after the reader has understood them themselves. The space reserved for him can’t exceed four lines per panel, which restricts him to short sentences, even though he has a taste for verbiage and overblown turns of phrase.

One of the things I find so delightful about Masters is the way that you play with clichés and conventions—particularly the clichés and conventions of the kinds of adventure stories and comics I remember reading in my own childhood. Were there any adventure stories or comics of that kind that you had in mind when creating Masters of the Nefarious? 

The series wasn’t based on the memory of any particular comic, but by the desire I had to create a vehicle that would permit me to explore very freely all the forms of idiocy that cross my mind on a daily basis, and equally to undermine the narrative clichés that we are so inured to that we no longer notice them. 

I remember doing a drawing inspired by a tiny photo cut out of a TV guide. The photo was taken from the American series Magnum P.I. and my drawing didn’t at all look like the original. There were three characters, from whom emanated something that I liked, that called for further development. The names of these characters came next, along with the language and the universe that accompany them. That’s how Fongor and the Themistecles brothers were born. I pulled on the end of a thread to see what would come out, and I continue to this day to unravel that ball of yarn.

You said that “the names of the characters came next,” which made me think of a specific question about the translation: In French, the Themistecles twins are named Chris and Félicien. You suggested that for the English version, we change the name Félicien to Montgomery. Why Montgomery?

There’s a disparity that I enjoyed in the contrast between the name Chris, very common and English-sounding, and Félicien, which is a rather old French name that hasn’t been popular for a long time. These names seemed to come from two completely different universes and that was enough to create an interesting vacillation, a bit like if Popeye the sailor was the brother of Galactus. The name Félicien certainly doesn’t have the same resonance for an English speaker, which is why I was looking for a slightly old-fashioned English name. A friend brought up the name Montgomery which immediately seemed to me perfectly suited to the character.

You originally drew a version of Masters of the Nefarious in the 90s, correct? What was your process like for drawing the original version and did that process change for the new version?

Masters has been with me since I began distributing my work at the beginning of the 90s, it’s a little bit of a throughline for me, a project I return to regularly, each time attempting to improve and clarify the initial vision. The first collection was published in the form of a zine, then a book came out via Éditions Jean-Pierre Faur (1993). The series continued for two years in the weekly magazine Les Inrockuptibles (1994-96) as a serial that ran in installments before being collected in a second collection by Jean-Pierre Faur. Then I stopped working on the series for about fifteen years.

What made you want to revisit Masters of the Nefarious?

When the first smartphones appeared, it seemed to me that they were perfectly adapted to a style of reading panel by panel that I had imagined since the beginning of my series. Each panel is a single page, upon which one’s gaze rests individually without being drawn away by the next. This made me want to pick up the series again and at the same time improve the writing and the drawings. Since then, three new collections have come out from Editions Cornélius in addition to being adapted in digital form.

Did you make any discoveries or was there anything particularly surprising, or difficult, about working on a comic with a one panel per page structure?

In the era when I adopted this form for my series, I was consumed with the idea of time and the duration that a comic panel can contain. Reading one page that contains a sequence of images conveys the impression of a certain temporal continuity, like a trickle of water that flows without interruption. I wanted something different, just as I didn’t want my characters to speak directly through speech bubbles. The choice to present each panel as an entire page and a closed bubble gave me more opportunities to play with form: In addition to creating a repetitive and absorbing rhythm, it gave me the ability to restart and reinvent the story on each page. Moreover, it allowed me to play with temporality in a very free manner. In certain Masters stories, several years pass between two panels, while certain situations that last for a second are drawn out over almost ten pages. It’s this particular form that constitutes for me a large part of the interest and amusement I have in constructing these stories.

Equestre 21 (watercolor, 2023)

You work in many different types of media. When you have an idea do you start off knowing what form you want it to take or is there more of a process of discovery? Does your work in one medium influence your work in another?

It’s different every time. Sometimes action precedes the idea, and sometimes it’s the opposite. When I create something starting from an idea, I already know what form I would like it to take but I can just as easily be surprised by something unexpected and let myself be carried away by it. Most of the time I proceed instinctively without asking myself too many questions, and it’s only much later that I notice the recurrence of certain themes and the appearance of clear links between different areas of my work. It often happens without any conscious effort on my part.

Scènes de la vie du monde (street exhibition, 2023)

Your work has also been shown in galleries. How does the context in which your work is going to be presented affect your process or conception of a work? 

When I’m invited to exhibit my work, I like to offer up something that has a relationship to the particularities of the place in question, whether it’s an art gallery, a museum, or someplace less typical. Last summer I was invited to show my work in a former Carmelite convent that has been transformed into a center for contemporary art. It’s a place filled with history and stories. I let myself absorb all this memory, and rather than offering up a straightforward display of existing pieces, I completed a series of paintings, a video, and an installation that were tailored to the architecture of the place, and which resonated with its history and the imprints it leaves in the imagination.

Human Beans (sculpture, 2015)

Do you feel there's a large difference between your gallery work and your comics?

I consider my comics work to be a part of my activity as a visual artist, it’s just one of its forms and it coexists with the others without a clean separation. Each artist has their own approach, but if I had to produce a body of work that was identifiable and similar over time, I would certainly get bored.

What initially drew you to working in comics and what are the advantages of working in comics? 

It was never a deliberate choice for me. As a child I found a refuge in the act of drawing, writing, sculpting, making collages and little films. It’s what I continue to do today, except that it’s in the context of a more deliberate process. I was lucky to be able to follow this path and complete my autodidactic education by studying art. What interests me about comics is that they allow for an amplification of the power of words and of images by inserting a dimension that transcends them both.

Do the Themistecles twins and Fongor have more adventures in store in their future? What other projects are you working on at the moment?

There are plans for a series of Masters of the Nefarious figurines, which will be accompanied by a mini album of 12 pages. I thought I was done with this series, but I now know how to make it evolve and I’m eager to explore this new direction.

Praticiens, 1991

I’m also working on multiple art book projects, each one exploring very different worlds. And I’m painting a series of miniatures for an exhibition on the theme of surfing that will take place in Nice in the spring.

Did the figurines and the mini album inspire this new path for Masters? Is this new evolution an evolution of the form or of the content of the series? 

The evolution that I’d like to introduce to the series is more in the category of form. There’s an aspect of the structure of my stories that I haven’t yet developed that would open a range of new narrative possibilities. This would amount to a natural evolution of the series, however it’s hard to talk about it as long as the work has not yet begun.

As for the figurines, the idea is above all to delight the public and to broaden the universe of my characters beyond the books. I have other projects in the same vein, there’s no lack of ideas, only a lack of time.

Are you curious to see how American readers will react to Masters of the Nefarious? Is there anything about the book that you think they will particularly respond to?

Being translated and published in the United States for the first time is a terribly exciting experience for me because it represents a return of sorts to my sources of inspiration. Many unique aspects of American culture have seeped into my imagination, as can be seen in my Masters stories. It’s always interesting and invigorating to observe the evolution of forms that travel from one culture to another, permeating and cross-pollenating each other in a continual back and forth no matter what the field. So of course I’m very curious to know how this book will be perceived by the American public and I confess I have absolutely no preconceived notions about the subject.

 

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