[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about Stigmata by Lorenzo Mattotti, now available to order from us and at a comics shop near you. – Ed.]

So... Mattotti, eh?

Yeah. I've long wanted to do a book by Lorenzo. For my money he's one of the most brilliant cartoonists in terms of sheer virtuoso draftsmanship who ever lived. I think among the current breed of Europeans he's rivaled only by Moebius and Blutch and I'd still rank him first. I was just biding my time.

It's been a while since anyone last published a Mattotti book in English, hasn't it?

Yeah. NBM published his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adaptation back in 2003, but before that you have to go all the way back to the early 1990s, when Catalan and Penguin U.K., probably spurred on by his appearances in RAW, published several of his 1980s graphic novels: Fires, Labyrinths, and Murmur. I should note that Mattotti is also a prolific illustrator (you've probably seen his covers on The New Yorker; there was one just two weeks ago), and hasn't published any new comics in something like seven years.

Is he retired from comics?

No, no, in fact, he's working on some sort of huge magnum opus which we're in line to publish when he finishes it, but who knows when that will be?

So what made you pick Stigmata?

I just really liked it. His "Ignatz" comic, Chimera, did pretty well for us, it was one of the few Ignatzes we had to reprint due to demand, and Stigmata is drawn very much in that style, wild, swirly, expressionistic black pen lines. And I responded to the story, about this hopeless miserable drunken lump of a guy who ultimately finds salvation. It's very dramatic and emotional without being hokey. In its own way it's a little reminiscent one of my favorite movies, Breaking the Waves.

Why, are you religious?

Ha! Not at all, I'm a stone cold Bill Maher/Ricky Gervais "religious-people-are-wack" atheist. But there are elements of Christian faith that I find admirable, and the Bible is fascinating, if not as history, then as allegory, and of course for its language. And I think the book's themes of suffering and redemption, of good and evil, even if they're communicated through the prism of Christian thought, are universal. It's a good read no matter what your spiritual inclination, although it may hit home the most with Catholics.

The last third of the book is mostly a long prayer; is that from the Bible? I thought I recognized some Job in there.

Yes and no. It's sort of a mix-tape of religious writing that includes, as you say, a passage from the Book of Job, as well as some lines from a couple of Psalms, and excerpts from the writing of two saints, St. Catherine of Siena and St. Theresa of Lisieux. Some of which I tracked down through the modern secular miracle of Google, some of which the author told me about.

Has the writer, Claudio Piersanti, written other comics?

Not that I know of, he's a novelist and screenwriter. In fact, from what I understand Stigmata was written as a movie script which never got produced. Piersanti and Mattotti knew one another, had a little bit of a mutual admiration society going on, and somehow Mattotti ended up with the script and decided to do it as a comic. Ironically, after it was published as a comic — a decade and a half later, in fact — a Spanish film director decided to make a movie out of it and adapted the comic.

Have you seen it?

I have a DVD of it which I haven't got around to watching, or rather I've only watched a bit of it, but it sure looks beautiful, and very faithful to the book based on the trailer. It's interesting, in order to find someone with the gargantuan physique required for the main role, they didn't even try to cast an actor but hired a world champion shot-putter, who is of course enormous. If you watch the movie it's kind of clear that he's a non-actor, but given the character he's playing it seems to work OK. If it had been done in the U.S. it might have been another great comeback role for Mickey Rourke.

Do you have any more Mattotti projects lined up after that?

Comics, no, not right away, but next year we're releasing an English language edition of his collaboration with Lou Reed on an illustrated edition or Reed's The Raven song cycle, itself of course a posthumous collaboration with Edgar Allan Poe. That'll be pretty cool. And I would like to release one of his color books, either the classic Fires, which was released by Catalan Communications a long time ago, or El rumor de la escarcha (The Sound of Frost), which is his most recent graphic novel and which is just stunning.

(From The Sound of Frost)

Any final words?

Yeah, go take a look at Mattotti's website — it's well worth a browse. Also, check out the art gallery that sells his art — if you don't have six thousand bucks handy to buy a page, you can window shop and pretend you won the lottery.

[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about King of the Flies Vol. 2: The Origin of the World by Mezzo & Pirus, now available to order from us and coming soon to a comics shop near you. – Ed.]

Congratulations on King of the Flies Volume 1 being named one of the 10 best graphic novel releases of the year by Amazon.com.

Thanks, that was a nice surprise. Not because I didn't think King of the Flies deserved it, but because I thought it had kind of flown in under everyone's radar.

Well, no one had heard of these guys before here...

Actually, that's not entirely true. Nobody remembers this, but back in 1998, in its death throes as part of the genetically spliced corpse of Tundra, Kitchen Sink released Pirus and Mezzo's Armed and Dangerous. You can find it for about fifty bucks on Amazon if you want. I wouldn't recommend it, the production on it is kind of screwed up, wait for someone to reprint it properly.

King of the Flies is a really odd book. It takes place in France, people pay stuff in Euros and Germany is just a few miles away but...

...But somehow all the names and cultural references are English or American, yeah. I mean, aside from the Gustave Courbet references in this new volume (including the title, and the cover, which is a pop-art parody of the painting of that title, by the way — look it up on Wikipedia, but be warned, NSFW). In case anyone was wondering, that's how it is in the French version, it's not the translator and me changing all the references from Serge Gainsbourg and Johnny Hallyday or anything — although obviously it would've been tough to graphically edit in the Rolling Stones, Jarvis Cocker, and Jan and Dean. King of the Flies basically exists in a weird globally neutral pop-culture realm, which these days means Anglo-American. It's one of its charms. Another charm is that you start off thinking it's realistic, but as you'll see in Volume 2 it starts going pretty far off the rails into the supernatural. It's a really cunningly constructed piece of writing that pulls you down the rabbit hole quite unexpectedly at times...

Have you read the third volume?

No. Mezzo and Pirus are only a dozen or so pages into it — they got sidetracked with some other projects — so I'm just as much in the dark as anyone.

King of the Flies really wears its influences on its sleeve at times...

I've heard that said less gently. There's no doubt that Mezzo — whose earlier work looks quite different, I might add, see the abovementioned Armed and Dangerous — absorbed a number of stylistic and structural tricks from Charles Burns in general, and Black Hole in particular, for this project. The very first time I saw King of the Flies I was a little taken aback myself. But the more I read it the more I realized that Mezzo and Pirus were bringing an enormous amount to the table themselves, and the writing and breakdowns really ultimately don't feel like Burns at all. David Lynch is discernable in there too, of course, but these days Lynch is virtually a genre. There's also some Watchmen DNA in there, I think, in the methodical, gridlike, writer-driven approach to panel breakdowns — and some thematic elements in the second volume. And the funny thing about the Burns connection is that Charles himself has moved so far away from his Black Hole style now that his recent X'ed Out — which borrows heavily from Hergé — looks nothing like King of the Flies. It's all grist for the mill.

The second volume is coming out just 10 months after that first. That's unusually quick.

Well, it's very much a continued story, and I didn't want people to forget it.

Did you consider waiting for the trilogy to be complete and publish it in one volume?

I briefly did, but I was concerned that doing that big of a book would make the price point too high. It's also so dense — I think readers need a breather. And I like the "serial" aspect to it, I want readers to worry about what's going to happen next. Anyway, Americans are getting a better deal than the French, for whom the books have been appearing with three-year gaps. That said, I do plan to release a special edition of the whole damn thing at some point. As I'm sure the French will.

This is one of the few European books you didn't translate yourself. How come?

I'd started realizing that I wouldn't be able to translate every single book we were doing indefinitely, so when I decided to do King of the Flies I had already started to think in terms of hiring a translator. I'd really liked the work Helge had done for Drawn and Quarterly, and she was game, she loved the book when I sent it to her, so it was game on! I've actually hired translators for a couple of other upcoming books next year, so there will be more of our releases that I'm not doing.

How involved are you in the translation?

When I work as a translator for an editor, as I have once in a while, I'm grateful for as much feedback as possible, so I did work a lot with Helge. I think we both agree that the final result is significantly better than what either of us could have done alone. But it's probably 95% Helge at least. And certainly every word I changed or fiddled with has been OK'd or approved by her, as well as by Michel Pirus, who speaks English quite well and was able to course-correct us when we missed some stuff. And he and Mezzo very nicely redid all the chapter-heading as needed for us, which is why it looks so perfect.

It's maybe the grimmest, darkest book you've released, except for War of the Trenches, which at least you could defend as historical. And it's hard to see how Volume 3 could in any way become more cheerful.

Yeah, but I love that kind of stuff, and I'm hoping enough other readers do. Besides which, it's often hilarious. The characters are all going to hell, but they're funny about it as they go.

[In this installment of our series of Editors Notes, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about The Littlest Pirate King by David B., Fantagraphics' second Franco-Belgian kids' comic release, now available to order from us or at a comics shop near you. – Ed.]

This is Fantagraphics' first full David B. book, right?

Correct. We published the second issue of his Ignatz comic Babel (D+Q published the first one before wimping out on the whole Ignatz deal), and four of his short stories in Zero Zero and MOME (in fact, the three MOME stories will be collected next year), but this is our first David B. release with a spine.

What made you pick this one specifically?

It more or less fell in my lap last year: The French publisher offered it to us, and if I didn't grab it up NBM, which released David's Nocturnal Conspiracies back in 2008, was ready to. I really enjoyed the story, and I thought it would make a nice match-up with Blanquet's Toys in the Basement to launch our Franco-Belgian kids' line. [Ed. Note: You can currently purchase The Littlest Pirate King and Toys in the Basement together for 20% off the cover prices!]

Are you and NBM in competition for books often?

Not really. Terry Nantier's and my tastes are pretty different, as are my tastes and First Second's — and, God knows, Heavy Metal's. But there are so many great European comics still to translate that this kind of collision is rare anyway.

It's David B.'s first color book, too?

In the U.S., yes, but it's about his sixth color book in France, actually; ever since he finished Epileptic and moved from L'Association to more mainstream French publishers like Dargaud and Dupuis — see, the Fantagraphics-to-Random-House alternative-to-corporate pattern isn't unique to the U.S.! — he's been working almost exclusively in color.

Who is this Pierre Mac Orlan who wrote the original story?

At this point I know as much about Pierre Mac Orlan as anyone who's bookmarked Wikipedia.org does. Apparently a French novelist, songwriter, and children's book writer.

Songwriter?

Sure, go to YouTube and key in his name, you'll get page after page of videos of French singers singing his songs.

For a kid's book, this has got some pretty adult stuff in it. Like the fact that the zombie pirates talk about the prostitutes back on land they miss...

This has been brought up to me by sensitive members of our staff. Well, it's handled pretty delicately. It would fly right over a theoretical young reader's head: He might think the pirate want to spend the money on the women just taking them out on dates or something. If anything, it's far more genteel than the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride in Disneyland, which used to have the pirates carrying off serving wenches with the clear intent of rape until it got politically corrected. (Perhaps even worse, they used to have one ugly serving wench who was disconsolate because no pirate would take her.) You could also argue that all the pirates' cursing God in Littlest Pirate King might be problematic for some parents, but they're pirate zombies, they're not role models. And they have a pretty good reason to be ticked off at God.

The ending is very bleak.

That's true. Although most Disney movies have even bleaker moments at one point or another, usually involving the death of a parental character. But I think kids can take it. It's not as bad as Old Yeller getting killed or anything. [Spoiler alert — Ed.]

You mentioned Babel, David's sequel-of-sorts to Epileptic, which delves into his relationship with his brother from a different angle, their shared fantasy life as kids. Will that ever continue?

Well, the whole Ignatz series ran into some rough waters. It was predicated on being published by at least three or four publishers in different countries, and after starting off with six (Holland, Germany, Spain, France, the U.S., and Italy), three of the publishers dropped out almost immediately because they discovered the format didn't work at all for their market, and of the three remaining two ran into financial or structural problems, which meant the books weren't being published and cartoonists weren't getting paid except by us, which wasn't sustainable. So David, like most of the cartoonists, had to move onto actual paid work. The good news is that as the Ignatz stuff gets sorted out it looks like he'll be able to finish the series with a third issue which he'll then be able to sell as a book in some of these markets, including the U.S. where we'll either release it as an Ignatz and then a book, or go straight to book. The funny thing is that we actually published several pages from #3 in our I.G.N.A.T.Z. Free Comic Book Day preview comic a few years ago, and that's literally the only place in the world those pages have been published... In the meantime he just published a really cool sketchbook comic, and I understand he's working on a major historical volume now.

Okay, so I'm confused... What if anything would you say is next for David B. in terms of Fantagraphics releases after the MOME stories collection?

I'm playing it by ear. Could be Babel if/when that's finished, could be this new project, could be one of his earlier L'Association books for that matter. Wait and see!

[In this first of what will hopefully be a recurring series of Editors Notes posts, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") on the subject of Fantagraphics' first Franco-Belgian kids' comic release, coming to a comics shop near you later in November. – Ed.]

This is your first Blanquet book. Why pick this one?

Honestly, it kind of dropped in my lap out of nowhere. I read it, I liked it, and I thought "Why not?" I've long wanted do publish a Blanquet book - we've published short stories of his in Zero Zero and Blab!...

This one is kind of outside his usual mode, though. I mean... a kids' comic? This is a guy known for body horror that makes David Cronenberg look like Walt Disney.

There's elements of that even in Toys in the Basement, but yes, that's true. What's even weirder is that the other long-form Blanquet book that's been translated into English is another more-or-less all-ages story, in Dungeon Monstres Vol. 2: The Dark Lord. The thing is, most of Blanquet's more Blanquet-y work in France has been published in these odd formats, little boutique presentations, none of which I think would really survive very well in the American book market. But actually that might end soon. I've been in contact with Blanquet's main French publisher, Cornélius, and they're talking about doing a sizeable omnibus collection that would collect some of those smaller books and other material and basically create a nice big sampler of Blanquet — something I could sell to Barnes & Noble. I told him I'm in!

Toys in the Basement is also apparently the first in a "line" of sorts...?

Yeah, my all-ages Franco-Belgian comics series. Again, I sort of backed into it. I'd decided to publish Blanquet's book, and then I was offered David B.'s Le roi rose, which we're publishing at The Littlest Pirate King, and then I figured, why not make an official series of it? Geometrically speaking, if you've got two points, you've got a line. So I asked Jacob Covey to come up with some overarching design, I wrote a little historical essay putting the whole Franco-Belgian kids' comics thing in perspective which we'll run in the back of each, and I've started buying up other material for it.

Will it be contemporary like these two, classic, or...?

The next two will be classic 1960s work, Tillieux and Macherot, but I plan to hop around and pick and choose from the entire last 50 years. I've always loved the Franco-Belgian kids comics: I grew up with them, and even though this may color my feelings somewhat, I firmly believe that was, and is, one of the true pinnacles of comics, absolutely on a par with Carl Barks or Walt Kelly.

Wouldn't the two Trondheim McConey books you did have fit into this line?

Sure, although the series veered into a bit more of adult sensibility in the later volumes. I might yet go back and do a few more of those, as a matter of fact.

Aside from Tintin and Asterix, and a few things from First Second, there really isn't that much being published in the U.S.

In some ways it's a tough genre to sell. It killed Catalan Comics back in the 1980s when they tried to expand their adult European graphic novels into a kids' line, Comcat, and if you remember Fantasy Flight, which published among other things a Franquin Spirou book which I translated, that was a noble disaster. But the material is so great; maybe the American readership is finally ready for it. NBM, who has dabbled in it themselves from time to time, is re-launching The Smurfs, for instance. The movie looks like it'll be an abomination, but if it gets people reading those classic albums again, that's good. (The Smurf King is one of the ten greatest European comics albums ever, seriously.) There's actually an outfit in the United Kingdom called Cinebook that's been doing a lot of work in the genre, including at least three stone classics, Lucky Luke, Blake and Mortimer, and Valerian, and a lot of solid other work like Iznogoud, Yoko Tsuno, and Boule et Bill (which they've re-dubbed Billy and Buddy, apparently in inadvertent tribute to Herman Melville). Those books do sell in the U.S., you can buy them through Last Gasp or on Amazon.com — they're nicely done, and really inexpensive, too. Seriously, any fan owes it to him- or herself to pick up a Lucky Luke and a Blake and Mortimer.

Aren't these AutoChats supposed to be promoting your books?

Well, yeah. I get carried away with the Team Comics spirit sometimes. Anyway, Toys in the Basement is a huge amount of fun, like everything Blanquet touches it's spectacularly drawn, it's one of the few books we've put out that's both totally kid safe and thoroughly entertaining for adults... I had a blast working on it. Buy it.