As Titeuf’s thirtieth birthday approached, Zep, his creator, realized that he had aged. And that he now looked less like his role hero, to whom he had lent his features, than his lover. “Inevitably, I look more and more like him.”admits in an interview with BFMTV. “That being said, the mistress and Titeuf have similar facial features. All my characters have the same DNA.”
Thirty years ago, Philippe Chapuis, alias Zep, imagined his Tintin: an instantly recognizable and easily drawn character, who has become a cult among French-speaking readers, with more than 20 million records sold. Not bad for a character who started out as “a kind of distorted vision” of himself: “I never had hair like Titeuf, but when I did my self-portrait, I always drew myself with such a mouth and big lips.”
Above all, don’t tell him it’s him. “Titeuf’s dad”. The 54-year-old Swiss designer, who has just published a guestbook with Glénat editions collecting anecdotes about his creation and unpublished drawings by him, hates this expression that he considers demeaning for the 9th Art: “It’s really a tic of language reserved for comics. He has a childish side. JK Rowling is not said to be the mother of Harry Potter.”
“I didn’t like it very much, because my children suffered a bit with it. They were little, they accompanied me to festivals and they always introduced me as ‘Titeuf’s father’. They wondered who this Titeuf was, that brother they were hiding!”
Dive back into the archives
For Titeuf’s guestbook, Zep delved into his archives to unearth previously unpublished drawings and forgotten drawings made for campaigns, newspapers, posters, festivals. We find there the famous story of Titeuf imagined in 2015 to The world to denounce the drama of the refugees in Europe, as well as illustrations that confront the hero with the tassel with the heroes of One piece, naruto Y Dragon Ball.
“I like this type of drawings where I claim characters that I did not create. It’s a real pleasure to draw”Zep explains. “I tried to have the character as pure and simple as possible, to make it as graphically malleable as possible. But I like to draw small details, that’s why I have fun with this type of drawing.”
This guest book also allows you to immerse yourself in the fabulous publishing history of Titeuf, initially rejected by all French-speaking publishers, before landing in Glénat. Released in January 1993, God, sex and braces it is printed in only 7,000 copies. Championed by specialized booksellers, it initially attracted adult readers.
“Children were in the minority.”remember Zep. “At first, when I was doing signing tours, it happened to me that there were collectors who asked me for porn with Titeuf and Nadia. I found it quite creepy.”
The second volume, love is cleanreleased in August 1993, followed nine months later by surprise the girls. In 1996, It’s just p… won an award at the Angouleme festival. Zep is constantly working: in four years, he has released six volumes! “I would have done even more, but my editor wanted me to be patient. I was afraid that this ease of writing about this character, which had come suddenly, would disappear…”
gruesome success
Zep has never lost inspiration: starting with the fourth volume, sales skyrocket. The designer sees the children arrive in droves during the signing sessions. “Word of mouth from children was faster than from comic book fans.” Quickly, the dedications become overwhelming: “I remember a dedication at the Virgin Megastore in Paris, with a queue that goes up several streets!”
Then the designer is treated like a rock star, which does not displease those who take his pseudonym from the group Led Zeppelin: “They took me out of festivals, in a separate place, with barriers. Sometimes there were up to 500 people queuing up. We told them there wouldn’t be 500 signings, but they stayed… A lot of signings turned into a disaster between 2000 and 2005.”
One day, during a festival in Switzerland, the situation escalates. A father takes a bookseller hostage to obtain a drawing for his son. “He went crazy, between the appetizer, the sun, the wait, the desire to please his son… He took a knife out of his pocket. She deactivated very quickly. She apologized. She understood that her gesture was disproportionate. I quickly made a drawing for him.”
“I’m in my Michel Drucker period!”
When Zep recalls how many drawings he had to do during his career, the designer is delighted. “to have created a character so easy to draw”: “If I had created Blueberry and had to draw it 100,000 times in signings, I would have slit my wrists by now.” He is also glad that titeufmania has died down a bit in recent years. “Dedications have become very quiet. I’m in my Michel Drucker period!”
Titeuf, for his part, is not yet in his Michel Drucker stage. A new gag album is planned for the start of the 2023 school year. More active than ever, Zep is also writing a musical on the songs of Henri Dés with Cirque du Soleil and a TV series, while overseeing an interview book. which will soon be posted by the Rue de Sèvres.
As the comic book world awaits news of Gaston’s rebirth, Zep is quite clear: Titeuf’s adventures will not continue after his death. “The idea would be to propose a letter that the authors can sign during their lives to say what they want. Because it’s a real problem: often people don’t say anything and after that it’s monstrous headaches for their children and publishers.” A good idea waiting to celebrate the half century of Titeuf.
Source: BFM TV
