"Empathy is our superpower": Émile Bravo will miss Spirou

Longingly awaited by fans, the last volume of “Spirou oder: die Hoffnung” has finally been published. After leaving the reader in a particularly dark and touching scene in the previous volume, Émile Bravo now completes the most extraordinary episodes of the alternative Spirou series.

Since 2008, the comic artist has followed his heroes Spirou and Fantasio in several volumes from the outbreak to the end of the Second World War in Belgium occupied by the Germans, allowing his characters to mature during this time. From a simple, little hotel bellboy, Spirou becomes a helper in the resistance against the National Socialists – even if he doesn’t suspect anything at first. Politically naïve at first, the teenage hero penned by Émile Bravo never loses his compassion and humanity.

In an interview with ntv.de, the comic artist tells how it feels to leave Spirou and his friend Fantasio after so many years and why empathy is a superpower that not even Marvel heroes can match. The mixture of adventure, historical facts, lots of humour, the allusions to great Belgian comics like “Tim and Struppi” and last but not least the reflection on the human condition was so well received by the fans that Bravo’s publisher didn’t wait until he had the whole had finished drawing the story, but immediately made separate volumes out of individual chapters.

ntv.de: Congratulations on the fifth and final volume of your Spirou series. After all these years, how does it feel to be done with Spirou?

Émile Bravo: I’m still in shock! (laughs) After working on Spirou for nine years, being in another world for years, I have to come back first. I actually didn’t finish until the beginning of March, that sounds like a long time, but it feels like yesterday to me. It’s the fourth volume by the way. Strictly speaking, “The Portrait of a Young Hero” doesn’t belong in the series, even though it was of course the trigger for it.

Seems to go well with my question of how Spirou and Émile Bravo got together in the first place.

In 2008 I was invited to do the “Portrait of a Young Hero” for a special edition Spirou. In these editions, various comic artists get a chance to further develop comic heroes. You don’t have to enter the original world of the characters, you can bring them into your world. Only after that did my publisher ask me if I could imagine drawing and writing another Spirou story. In “Portrait of a Young Hero” we see Spirou at the beginning of the Second World War – afterwards I thought: it would be interesting to follow the development of his mind and personality during the war and also to show Belgium during the occupation. I wanted to remind young and adult readers of what it was like for people when World War broke out.

Spirou is also about themes like home or identity. At the beginning Spirou sees himself as Belgian, later not so much.

It makes him think when he meets this girl, Kassandra, who could come from anywhere. It doesn’t really have an identity, a home. Your identity is to be human. Spirou can understand that. In the second volume I tell about the conflict between Flemings and Walloons and my point was that it doesn’t matter where you come from. Whether Flemish or Walloon, we are all human! The example of the Second World War shows where nationalism leads and we still have the problem today. It’s horrifying to me that people are searching for their identities while the world is in a mess. We have our planet to save our climate.

You come from a family that had to find a new identity and home. Her father fled to France before the Spanish Civil War.

Right. As a child, everyone used to tell me I was French, but I said no, I’m not. This is one of the most important lessons in life for me: everything is random. I could have been born in a different time, in a different place. When you realize that, you know that what we need above all is a lot of empathy.

The four albums make up a heroic story – with a hero who doesn’t live up to classic comic standards. What would you say is the main difference between Spirou and Superman? Or Spirou and Tintin from the “Tim and Struppi” series, which you allude to again and again in the four volumes? What is Spirou’s Superpower?

I always think the human brain is the superpower. When you think about human history, it’s amazing that we have the ability to learn and evolve our brains. We just need to get away from thinking only about work. We need more time to better understand the world and the different cultures. To me, a hero is also someone who shows empathy and humanity – like Spirou. This could also be the big difference between the comic book heroes in Europe and the American super heroes from the Marvel comics. We have fewer heroes with sudden superpowers, it’s always about the human condition, so it’s more philosophical. Our strength lies in humility.

The super powers probably do better in the cinema. In Germany, the Marvel comics are a hit with young people.

It’s the same in France – Marvel everywhere!

The US comics mentioned are more familiar to readers in this country than the European graphic novels, to which Spirou belongs. The word contains the novella, a novel form. Can you explain to our readers how, for example, you create a series like the Spirou one?

I didn’t write volume by volume, but told the whole story once in 300 pages. With pencil drawings. That’s where the creative work lies for me. When that was finished, I started from scratch with the final artwork. I had planned three chapters and a conclusion. But my publisher didn’t want to wait that long and then published a volume after each chapter.

The drawings almost pulled out from under your fingers.

Exactly! (laughs). I had just put in the ink afterwards and you could still see the blue shadows of the initial drawings, I call them the spirits of creation. I see the scenes including the dialogues in front of me and only then can I draw them.

So you put down on paper the movie that’s playing in your head.

More a theatre! There’s a little theater in my head. It’s exhausting work because you have to get into the minds of all the characters. You have to understand all the characters, the bad guys, even the dog! That brings me back to empathy: you need empathy with the worst characters here, too. One must also understand the evil nuances.

How do you keep a long relationship like Spirou and you fresh? Do you still want to continue working on the story after so many years?

That wasn’t a problem, I got a lot of love back from my characters as well. Spirou and Fantasio were my sons!

They obviously took a lot of care not to provide the characters with today’s knowledge. At some point in the story, all characters ask themselves how the world war will end and what effects it will have on their lives. A bit like the questions we’re asking right now about Ukraine, relations with Russia and so on. How difficult was it not to incorporate today’s knowledge into history?

At the time of writing I was really living in Belgium, with the Nazis around me, the hunger, the fear. Overall, it wasn’t difficult for me to put myself in people’s shoes. My parents lived through all that, they told me a lot, my whole upbringing was still very close to that time. I was born in 1964 – that’s 20 years after the war, that’s nothing. We need time and distance to understand what is really happening. That’s how we feel about Ukraine today. In 1940 many people in Europe still believed that Germany would win the war, not many people put their faith in Great Britain. Fascism was a revolution, something new. Today we condemn it, but that wasn’t necessarily the case back then. For example, at the end of the first chapter, Fantasio wants to go to Germany to work there – many readers got angry and said: Why are you making a collaborator out of Fantasio? But Fantasio thought only that he needs work. He did not see himself as a collaborator.

Today it is again difficult for many people to classify world events. My father is 94 years old, he saw the end of the war, for him the Russians were the liberators, but what on earth is the Russian army doing now?

I understand him well. As a child, I also considered the Red Army and the US Army to be my friends, after all, they liberated Europe. Then came the Iraq war.

There is one place in the new volume where more knowledge about the course of the war shines through – when on the train to the camps a secular Jew argues with a religious Jew and accuses him of being blind.

I think there were many different levels of knowledge. At the time the band is playing, some people, such as Felix Nussbaum, have already had bad experiences with the new regime. You’ve lost faith that this will end well.

The painter Felix Nussbaum, who goes into hiding with his wife after the outbreak of war and is cared for by Spirou and Fantasio. How did the historical figure Felix Nussbaum get into your story?

That was pure coincidence. I looked for historical models to explain the Holocaust. I remember at one point finding it impossible to find anything suitable. I couldn’t send Spirou to Auschwitz. He wouldn’t have survived, or if he had, he wouldn’t be the old Spirou anymore.

Even the end of the third volume was absolute horror.

Exactly. In any case, there was even an exhibition in Paris with the works of Felix Nussbaum in 2010, but I didn’t go and only got to know his works a short time later. When I saw the picture “The Triumph of Death” I immediately asked: who did it? It was a shock. Who is this Felix Nussbaum? Then I found out that he was living in Brussels during the occupation. He was the grail for me. I knew I had to tell his story, he could teach the children and young people something. He has translated his suffering into pictures, his story is terrible, so dramatic, there is no happy ending for Felix Nussbaum. Felix Nussbaum is also a good example of how much harder the war hit the Jews than the rest of the civilian population. Those who were politically persecuted still had a small chance of surviving. Jews don’t. Therefore, at the end of my story, the priest and the hotel manager return home. Felix Nussbaum does not. When I tell readers that Felix Nussbaum actually existed, it comes as a shock to many. But I don’t kill my characters. Our world is killing them.

Do you already have plans for a new project?

No, not at all. I’m going to rest a little, sort my brain, and then think about what I have to say. There’s always a lot to say because humanity is so stupid it’s funny again.

Samira Lazarovic spoke to Émile Bravo