Boulet Visits CCS

This past April, French cartoonist, Boulet (Gilles Roussel) paid the Center for Cartoon Studies a short visit. Part of a larger US tour in which Boulet was promoting Noirness, his first solo US-published material, Boulet’s visit saw Boulet soaking up the sights and sounds of White River Junction..

To see White River Junction through Boulet’s eyes, hop on over to his site! Boulet has been keeping a online comics diary since 2004, so there’s plenty to read, should you like what you see.

During his visit, Boulet (Gilles Roussel) gave a lecture on the evolution of his cartooning practices.

He spoke about streamlining his creative process and the increased emphasis on improvisation that he had developed in his work. He spoke about working with Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim on the series, Dungeon along with the exquisite corpse comic, Chicou Chicou, that he developed with several French cartoonists.

The aim of Chicou Chicou was to create a fictional “auto-bio” group comics blog. The cartoonists would pass strips back and forth over the internet adding pages until they were complete. Each of the cartoonists involved created a persona and crafted a drawing style that suited their character. Boulet played a small, geeky girl named Ella.

Besides discussing the subtleties of drawing stories from the perspective of a female character, Boulet talked about the harassment he received online when writing under a female pen-name. He reported receiving unsolicited love letters and invitations on dates and noted that when he got into disputes people would ask “are you on your period or something?”

At the end of his talk, Boulet spoke succinctly of his influences and of his current project, a 200 page improvised story in which he is neither pencilling nor scripting. Later that day, he showed several of the 60 pages that he’d  completed. Needless to say CCS students were in awe.

Be sure to check out the video below to see Boulet’s improvisational skills first hand!