Travelling came fairly quickly through my work as a draughtsman. I'm not necessarily in search of documentary accuracy, but I very quickly felt the desire to go and see for myself. To begin with, I went to the East in search of sensations, following in the footsteps of my origins. To prepare Hunting Party, even though the story wasn't yet clearly written, I headed for the USSR. To do this, I took my driving test at the age of 28 and even bought a black Renault 5, the official colour in the former Soviet Union. I took photos and scouted out places in an anarchic way, just to bring back impressions. I'm also very fond of Berlin, which has often helped me to find a certain kind of excitement, sometimes unhealthy, in hanging out along the Wall to soak up the history of the place. For me, these are special moments when you really experience things. Not necessarily to get a photo or a sketch like Edgar P. Jacobs, who was extremely precise, but to come back with a flood of images in your head. Our brain's hard drive always ends up producing something authentic.
Personally, I love travelling for the breaks and the comfort it brings. New York, an eternal pleasure and an inexhaustible source of intellectual and artistic stimuli. Asia, which I fell in love with thirty years ago, is a destination that clears my head. In Bangkok, for example, despite the effervescence and fury that reign in the city, there is no aggression. Every time I come back to Paris, I can feel the tension. Never there. What a pleasure it is to savour these moments of retreat when I settle down to write, read and paint. I've drawn perhaps the most terrible things, the most violent scenes in the 'Monster' cycle, under a big blue sky by a turquoise sea! I love this kind of situation. Too often we think that artists only need darkness to produce or create. The mind is a kind of muscle which, once it has learnt some gymnastics, can extract itself from the environment in which it finds itself.
I regret that the world is becoming as uniform as airports. I remember wandering around airports in the Middle East. Today everything looks the same. You close your eyes when you take off, you open them again when you land, and you have the impression that you're in the same place. The same places, the same ways of dressing, everywhere, it's all extremely disappointing. Exoticism is disappearing everywhere. It's one of the failures of the democratisation of travel. "
Five dates
1951: Born in Belgrade, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
1960 Leaves for Paris, where he joins his exiled father.
1975: First album, La Croisière des oubliés, based on a script by Pierre Christin, a few years after his first story published in "Pilote", L'Appel des étoiles.
1987: Wins the Grand Prix at the 14th Angoulême International Comics Fair.
1989: Directs his first film, Bunker palace hôtel, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Carole Bouquet. Two other feature films followed: Tykho Moon in 1996 and Immortel in 2004.
