An interview with Étienne Lécroart: mathematics and creative comics | Tangente

An interview with Étienne Lécroart

Mathematics and its history can both become the subject of comics. Some authors draw inspiration from these subjects to devise the very structure of their pages. We spoke with one of them, the iconic Étienne Lécroart, who believes that "all mathematics stems from the same thing: logic."

Tangente: Besides your particularly effective cartoons, your work is strongly marked by formal experiments, often inspired by mathematical constraints. Has this dialogue with mathematics always been a conscious one?**

Étienne Lécroart: Most of the time, yes. I start with mathematical structures and see how they can be adapted to my medium. But I also sometimes bring in mathematics a posteriori. For example, when I created my infinite two-page comic Résonneur (published in Contes & Décomptes, L’Association, 2012; see box), I had to find a suitable mathematical formula in order to complete it.

Contes & Décomptes: an Oubapo classic ---------------------------------------------------

For anyone not yet familiar with Étienne Lécroart’s work, particularly its mathematical side, the collection Contes & Décomptes, published by L’Association in 2012, offers an excellent overview. It contains several creations, each as imaginative as the next.

Among them are the adventures of Boole and Bill. These are no little boy and his cocker spaniel, but the mathematician George Boole (1815–1864) and the famous Buffalo Bill (1846–1917), whose real name was William Frederick Cody. Each page is divided into two columns of panels: Boole’s on the left and Bill’s on the right… while in the middle, the panels intermingle! Fragments of text and drawings shared by the two stories create a new Boule et Bill story.

The story Compter sur toi, more moving and personal in subject matter, deals with the death of the author’s sister. The first panel, showing her in her fiftieth year, contains fifty lines and fifty words; the second shows her in her forty-ninth year and contains forty-nine lines and forty-nine words; and so on, down to the final panel.

Some mathematical objects have directly inspired your work—Graeco-Latin squares, Boolean algebra, the four-color theorem… How did these ideas come to you? Through reading about mathematics? Through people you met?

An interview with Étienne Lécroart: mathematics and creative comics | Tangente

An interview with Étienne Lécroart

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