For its author-illustrator, this book was foundational. That’s how Hervé’s book came to be honored with a Ragazzi Award at the Bologna International Book Fair, in the nonfiction category, with an emphasis on “a feeling of complete innovation.” Even today the contemporary quality of the book speaks clearly, through the profusion of concepts included, the movement from page to page, and the use of the cutout.

The result was a volume about opposites, a theme that had not yet been explored in concept books but that would be widely taken up afterward, until it became a children’s genre in and of itself. Both his notebooks and the box of ideas that sat on his current editor’s desk overflowed with these binaries. The dynamic of dialectic oppositions, already very present in Hervé’s first book, was refined during his first few years in children’s illustration. Night/Day, Seuil Jeunesse, 1998/Little, Brown & Company, 1999 I wasn’t on the wrong track, so I ploughed ahead. Most importantly, every book followed in the same vein which must mean that there was a vein. So I did what everybody does: a sequel, then another. But the question of sales was very abstract for me.įor the second book, I didn’t have an idea. Once the book was published, it didn’t sell.

The drawings were absolutely not up to snuff the hands, for example, were reversed, I worked on basic typewriter paper, very thin and delicate, Like in a publicity stunt, the strength of the image gives all the explanation necessary. Little by little I accumulated playful links or transitions: from the guy to the black eye. Hervé Tullet: What came to me first wasn’t the story, but the associations

There is also its use of a cutout, until then only used by artists like Tana Hoban or Katsumi Komagata (whose books Hervé discovered thanks to his first editor at Hachette, Fani Marceau). Rather, it is the play of associations among ideas and the humorous portrayals that make up the book’s primary appeal. In fact, the story itself is not the main event, or at least it isn’t meant to be taken at face value. Maybe my first provocation? I wanted to make a book that was funny for both adults and children, but that would remain at a child’s level. My first book for kids was in a certain sense the book of an ad man.Ī little trendy, a little zeitgeisty, funny, with a subject that raised themes not yet approached in children’s literature.įrom a certain point of view, it’s a book about love and violence. We would juxtapose a problem and a revelation it was binary, efficient. This required a real intensity, an almost automatic search for ideas-all this was my culture. At the time, new content was starting to be shown on TV: short bits, funny and incisive, very energetic gags. I worked based on what I had learned in advertising, on a metronomic rhythm, “tick tick boom,” particularly in all the research I did to produce videos.

Press Here by Hervé Tullet