CROMWELL

CROMWELL ◊ ANITA BOMBA One day I stopped working... (T.3), Casterman 1996 Original plate no. 33. India ink and acrylic ink on Fabriano paper 45.3 × 60.7 cm (17.83 × 23.9 in.) This is one of the few panels in which the four main characters - Anita Bomba, Sig 14, Le Mentor and Lieutenant Bottle aka La Misère - are all together. It's an important page for several reasons. Firstly, because it's a chapter heading, with its Jules Vernes-style header, and secondly, because it reveals the importance of scriptwriter Éric Gratien's writing and the singularity of his pen. For four pages of comics, I needed one page of manuscript, but Éric would often give me four. I had to cut his text down to the essentials, which was heartbreaking because everything was so good. Naturally, to give as much space as possible to the text, I drew few squares and played with ellipsis. For this particular drawing, it was complicated to fit in all the necessary information. It's a suspended moment, in which I had to give a feeling of movement and tension. The scene is dramatic, since Anita is supposed to be dead. I wondered how Éric Gratien was going to bring her back to life. When I read the script, I had a good laugh: Anita's soul was lost in the limbo of hell, Sig 14 had become Orphée 14. Anita was about to be resurrected thanks to La Misère's blood. After the transfusion, her first words were, "What? Cop blood in my veins?!" and she spits on La Misère. This is the key moment in the story when the villain brings Anita back to life, and the other characters undergo transformations too. I drew this page in 1995. At the time, computers were still in their infancy, working with floppy disks. For the set, I drew these machines, which are totally archaic. We weren't doing real SF, but steampunk, and there weren't many of us doing that at the time. Cromwell