WILL

WILL TIF ET TONDU Le Grand Combat (T.13), Dupuis 1968 Original plate no. 1, prepublished in Le Journal de Spirou no. 1501, January 19, 1967. India ink on paper 34 × 43.5 cm (13.39 × 17.13 in.) This plate marks the beginnings of one of Tif et Tondu's most surreal and bizarre stories, written by Maurice Rosy, who has been responsible for the script since 1956, in addition to his duties as artistic director of Le Journal de Spirou. It's one of the most successful adventures of the Will/Rosy duo. It's a dreamlike world where you enter a nightmare controlled by Choc, who has stolen the science of dream control from a Tibetan lama. The plate captures the unreal aspect of the sequence very well, regardless of the fact that the heroes themselves find things strange: the shadows are exaggeratedly long - a process borrowed from the painter Salvador Dali - and the houses are schematic, without details, as much as mute. It is with these simple, perfectly stylized elements that Will manages to convey the eerie strangeness of the dream. Note the plaque bearing the word "tol", which means "customs" in... Flemish. It's easy to see that we're in Belgium, the land of surrealism if ever there was one. "When Rosy rubs shoulders with surrealism and mysticism... Will had been warned in advance, although as a small child, I vividly remember my father doing graphic research, inspired by Magritte and Dali. It began humorously with an apple-planet lost in space, and soon generated a series of paintings with hyperstylized architectures verging on cubism. My father has always documented his stories, but for once, there was a lot of preparatory work involved. In this beautiful page, the mood of the album is set in just a few squares and with demonic simplicity. The first panel, on 44 pages, of one of the most striking albums of 1967." Éric Maltaite