3,100 Bengal Lights
Comic artist Bengal talks to Guu about the state of the industry, what makes him tick, and how it sucks to be broke.
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By Althea Chia
Dec 10, 2004 | Zealot of experimental electronic music and smelly cheese, French artist Bengal is perhaps better known for his Asian-inspired CG work -- all fluid lines and skewed angles and paints that seem molten in their intensity.
Bengal quit his day job as a game artist in 2003 to delve deeper into comics, working with scenarist Jean-David Morvan on the graphic novel Meka. It's a classic character piece. Two ace pilots are shot down and stranded on a cold, abandoned battlefield. Out of their meka and out of their element, they venture into a world they weren't trained to deal with: human relationships. Meka was published in May 2004 to acclaim and volume two is slated for release soon. Here, Bengal sums up his life so far:
| 1976 - Born in the Alps,
France |
The timeline may seem short but with a workload allegedly the size of Pavonis Mons, Bengal is a busy man. His MSNM status says so. The fact that we’re doing this interview one question a day hammers it home.
So what’s been keeping you so insanely busy?
Actually, after having worked on some short stories for Spirou magazine and Flight Volume 1, I have to catch up on Meka 2 now. Readers won't wait for years to know the end of the story! But apart from that, I’m trying a little more than last year to not work 24/7, and instead to get some fresh air, see friends, and buy things from time to time... Hard, isn't it? I wish days were 50 hours long!
So far, almost half of Meka 2 has been pencilled and 7 pages coloured but now that I am back full-time on it, it won't take long and the publisher hopes to get the whole piece by March (which would imply a release by May or so).
)
AND,
as if this weren't enough, I’m planning to do another series with
my writer JD Morvan, and a series on my own -- something I would own and
direct myself. But right now, I cannot tell how things will turn out exactly
after Meka. Only one thing’s certain: more graphic novels
by me will be available in the years to come. Word!
It’s interesting that you use the word "direct" because Meka struck me as being really cinematic -- 24 frames per second condensed onto paper.
My only point in doing novels is the storyline. To me, how I conduct the storytelling is more important than seeking special skills in pencilling. I don't care at all whether what I do is beautiful or not -- I just want it to be readable and entertaining. On a page, I spend most of the time on prior storyboarding and on colours afterwards. The pencilling is something very intuitive, free and fast.
Well, to be specific, I don't think the dynamics can come from twisted, weirdly shaped panels, arranged and rearranged in a way that makes it too messy to understand. The global dynamics of a page can be obtained within the basic rule of a page, like the way it's been done since over a century ago: with a good sense of choosing the "moments" inside the panels. That's why I use only good ol’ regular, squarish panels but spend some time contemplating how to put the action in perspective inside them.
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