I had a very cavalier attitude toward wide space and that made the drawing sometimes more experimental. When you’re in school, the more drawings you have on the wall by the end of the year, the better.

So you have a lot of that in play already with The Wrong Place which you were working on in art school.īE: The Wrong Place marked a huge jump for me graphically at around age 21 and because it started as a school project, I wasn’t yet thinking about saving paper. Each character is assigned a color to signify who’s speaking and interacting. You’re using color in a thick blocky way. I’m sure that you see tons of things that are different, but it’s clear you have the chops and you’re already drawing your characters in a loose, cartoony way. TD: One of the things that struck me is the similarity between your first book, The Wrong Place, and your most recent one, The City of Belgium, stylistically. I try to use it as much as possible, try to use the space to tell the story, but the story itself always comes from something about a person, or an interaction between characters. And then quite quickly I start thinking of the space, but that’s the second phase. Instead, some machinery inside the character gets me interested. The books don’t start from a world or a space. I have to give a lot to the reader on every page. Could you talk a bit about the idea of creating the space and letting the characters loose in it?īrecht Evens: Partly the detail of the drawings might be a fear of wasting paper. You don’t seem in a rush, which is almost surprising given how detailed your painting is. And eventually everything comes into sharp focus. They joke and chat and have digressive conversations.

One of the things I noticed is that you seem to create a space and then let your characters loose in that space. I’ve read them so many times as we worked on them over the years, but what’s nice about doing the full reread is seeing different threads, getting a feel for how the artist views the world. Tom Devlin: In preparation for this, I pounded your four books in quick succession. The interview presented below offers the highlights of their lively, joke-filled conversation, which took place on Zoom, with Evens speaking from his studio in Paris, and Devlin from the Drawn & Quarterly office in Montreal. The driving force behind October’s conversation was the June release of Evens’s The City of Belgium, his fourth and most ambitious book. Evens and Devlin have worked together since Evens sent a cold submission to D+Q that became his first book The Wrong Place. Brecht Evens and Tom Devlin spoke to one another as part of D+Q Live, a fall events initiative by the graphic novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly.

The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens