Contemporary Authors

• The Wrong Place Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2010
• The Making Of Drawn & Quarterly (Montreal, Canada), 2012

1. The making of https://lccn.loc.gov/2012451755 Evens, Brecht, 1986- The making of / Brecht Evens ; translated by Laura Watkinson & Michele Hutchison. 1st hardcover ed. Montréal : Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. 1 v (unpaged) : chiefly col. ill. ; 25 cm. PN9714 .E946 2012 ISBN: 9781770460737 2. Wrong place https://lccn.loc.gov/2010530033 Evens, Brecht, 1986- Wrong place / Brecht Evens. Montréal, Quebec : Drawn & Quarterly ; New York, NY : Distributed in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Griroux, 2010. 1 v. (unpaged) : ill. ; 22 cm. PN6714 .E94 2010 ISBN: 9781770460010 (hbk.)

• Panther - 2016 Drawn and Quarterly, Montreal, Canada

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/04/brecht-evens-on-crafting-horrific-storybook-beauty.html

  QUOTED: "I didn’t need to do research for this book, but it is influenced by, and a reaction to, all kinds of children’s stories. Mostly the modern ones, where monsters are funny. And yes, if Stephen King’s It and Bill Watterson’s Hobbes had a lovechild you might get Panther."

  Brecht Evens on Crafting Horror and Storybook Beauty in Panther
  By Hillary Brown | April 27, 2016 | 11:00am
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  Brecht Evens on Crafting Horror and Storybook Beauty in Panther

  If you’re older than 30 and have creative aspirations, you may not want to hear that Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens, who has produced three surpassingly lovely books and is at work on a fourth (due 2017), just reached that age this year. Go ahead and curse his name and his talent, but give thanks for it at the same time. His pages shine bright with color, almost floral in its abundance, and they rarely use panels. But they’re not just beautiful. The mind at work here thinks about less obvious ways of achieving truths. Nothing is straightforward. No omniscient narrator sets the reader at ease.

  PANTHERcover.jpg

  Panther, his latest, is the story of an imaginary friend who may not be all that friendly. That simple description, though, fails to convey the creeping dread that accompanies the reading experience, which stretches graphic art tension as far as it can go, driven by a child’s desperate need for love and attention. Evens is busy touring to celebrate Panther’s English-language release from publisher Drawn & Quarterly, but exchanged several emails with us to discuss his fine-art influences, development as an artist and longtime love of creating imaginary worlds.
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  Paste: You can almost see a process of growing up over the course of your three books, in terms of their narrative subtlety and the ideas they address. How do you think you’ve changed since you began drawing/painting The Wrong Place?

  Brecht Evens: I’m glad to hear you see progress, I suppose that is what every artist wants to hear. Basically I’m gathering more skills, while trying to hold on to old stuff that still works. I think my characters are getting more complex, too. I know my books are still instantly recognizable to someone who read The Wrong Place, and I think this is mainly because I haven’t dramatically changed my way of drawing the characters. The trick with a character having a signal color to his body and his speech still works for me. I’m not out to make dramatic changes just for the hell of it; it has to have a purpose. My next book (The City of Belgium) has a setup very similar to The Wrong Place: three characters running around in a city at night. So I’m playing with giving those books a shared universe, with “extras” from The Wrong Place showing up in the new book. Even the protagonists from The Making Of and Panther have a discreet cameo appearance.

  Paste: I liked seeing you mention David Hockney as an influence. Could you talk a little more about that?

  Evens: There’s something almost didactic about his work. It’s like he’s building a catalog of methods for other painters to use, saying, for example: “let’s try two hundred ways of drawing water” or “I notice you’ve been having trouble with rural landscapes, let me see if I can rustle up five hundred good ones.”

  Paste: What other fine art influences do you have?

  Evens: I feel like I shop around a lot. I’m going to list Elvis Studio (for the massive cityscapes), Ever Meulen (for the optical games), Georg Grosz (for the messy spaces), Giotto (for the decors), Charles Burchfield (for the watercolors alive with light, sound, vibration and movement), a touch of Bruegel, Persian miniatures and other medieval drawings, Picasso, Miro, Kuniyoshi, Saul Steinberg, outsider artists like Wölfli and Henry Darger, my former student Nina Van Denbempt and my fellow alumni Lotte Van de Walle and Brecht Vandenbroucke. There’s also a lot of artists I like that I can’t emulate yet, whose work has no useful elements I can chip off.

  PANTHERinterior_14.jpg
  Panther Interior Art by Brecht Evens

  Paste: I love seeing you mention Charles Burchfield. In my actual day job, I work at a museum, and we have one that goes out on display somewhat regularly: one of the crazy nature ones, not one of the sedate gray ones. Also: we do not have any of Hockney’s landscapes, but they’re just the best. He makes me care about landscapes in a way I never thought I could.

  Evens: What does a Burchfield look like, physically? Is it much different from images in a catalogue?

  Paste: It’s kind of bigger than you’d expect, and messier. You know he went back and added extra paper around the edges because he wanted to make the works bigger (which is also why they have these large date ranges; he was repurposing old work). So you can see some of that, as well as the underlying pencil sketches.

  Evens: I think my drawings are also bigger and messier than you’d expect. So there are pencil sketches beneath? That’s a surprise… Do you know about the medication he took?

  Paste: I hadn’t heard that about Burchfield, but it’s not surprising. I do know about the nutty weather diaries. Tell me more!

  Evens: Alright. So, I’m not into Burchfield’s realistic work. The periods I like are a summer he seems to have had as a 17-year-old, and his late period, from his 50s on I think (I’m making an effort not to Google this). He then even picked up some of his adolescent watercolors and expanded on them, adding pieces of paper as you’ve seen. Some of these early watercolors, and all of the late ones, have something psychotic about them. Sound, touch, all the other senses come into play, heightened, translated into inventive marks with a brush. He makes mosquitos and electric wires buzz, birds fly by too fast to see, the sunlight causes mirages, and the sun itself becomes a black dot, as would appear when you look at it for too long. This psychotic vision, or just a clear and more complete vision if you like, has been linked to effects caused by his heart medicine. I don’t know how that explains the adolescent watercolors…maybe teenagers tend to get a bit manic-psychotic in summer. Now I’m thinking of Newton… Anyway, the idea of this very rural, doughy-looking quiet type, standing in a marsh with his rubber boots, doing magnificent and visionary watercolors because of his heart pills, makes me happy.

  Paste: I can see all those influences you mentioned in your work (of the ones I know), mostly insofar as you are not afraid to use color. Is that something that’s always been natural for you? What do your drawings from when you were a child look like?

  Evens: Mostly black and white, never very painterly. I sucked at using color for a long time, until I hit my stride in The Wrong Place.

  PANTHERinterior_15.jpg
  Panther Interior Art by Brecht Evens

  Paste: So how did you learn how to use color? You went to illustration school, right? Any of that there? Or was it independently?

  Evens: I got on the right track when I started doing a small color sketch before doing the actual drawing. If you do this, unavoidably you’ll apply proportionally big swaths of dominant color. The sketches looked good, so I just did the same thing on the large sheet of paper, working the details out afterward. Later on, I didn’t need the color sketches anymore, just went straight for that big brush. And after that I just got better and braver at it, through habit, without really needing the big brush.

  Paste: Are you particular about what kinds of watercolor you use? Brushes? What’s your set-up for working?

  Evens: Actually I hardly use real watercolor, but a “liquid watercolor” called Ecoline. It’s more like a color ink. Then there’s a lot of gouache, color markers, black ink and some crayons. Real watercolor comes in little blocks, placed close together in a box, that you have to rub with water to make it…it seems like too much hassle. But watercolor’s perfect when I feel like really bungling a drawing.

  Paste: How do you get into the mindset of a child who’s lost a parent, whether through death or other means?

  Evens: Did you feel I got into the mindset?

  Paste: Hmm. I don’t know. I’m not a child who’s lost a parent. But it feels like you did. This book is a little bit funny, but also it is terrifying. I read it right before bed and then I couldn’t get to sleep because it unsettled me. Did you set out to do that? Why? What made you want to write a horror story? Am I on the wrong track that her dad is the bad guy here?

  Evens: I think me answering those questions won’t make the book any better. But it interests me that people go Cluedo with this book, looking for—and finding—clues in the backgrounds. Which might make them look harder at the drawings. The game I tried to play in Panther is swinging a pendulum between desirable fun and absolute horror, tic, toc.

  PANTHERinterior_16.jpg
  Panther Interior Art by Brecht Evens

  Paste: There’s something of a fairytale about Panther. What reading did you do to prepare for it? I feel like Stephen King’s It might be relevant here, but I could be on the wrong track.

  Evens: I didn’t need to do research for this book, but it is influenced by, and a reaction to, all kinds of children’s stories. Mostly the modern ones, where monsters are funny. And yes, if Stephen King’s It and Bill Watterson’s Hobbes had a lovechild you might get Panther.

  Paste: What scares you?

  Evens: Venereal disease and lung cancer. Just keeping the answers sexy here.

  Paste: Let’s talk about dreams. They seem to be another important thematic thread in your work. A lot of it takes place in an expanded reality, a space that’s dreamlike as far as the possibilities of what could happen. What makes you interested in them? Do you have particularly vivid dreams yourself?

  Evens: I like when you say “expanded reality.” That’s what I aim for. I do think I use visuals that might be dreamlike, or psychedelic, but I don’t think I use dream logic. I have vivid dreams but I hardly ever write them down or draw them, even though people like Fellini made magnificent sport out of doing that. Felllini’s notes and drawings have been collected in an awesome book, but it’s not so much his dreams themselves that interest me. It’s the gritty, random page layouts and the speedy, practical use of lines and color—someone getting something very complex on the page in a hurry. My own dreams are interesting to me, but haven’t you ever gotten bored or distracted listening to someone else telling you the details of some long dream? I recently wrote a piece of dialogue where someone does that.

  Paste: Did you have any imaginary friends when you were a child?

  Evens: No. Only imaginary worlds.

  PANTHERinterior_20.jpg
  Panther Interior Art by Brecht Evens

  Paste: Tell me about these imaginary worlds.

  Evens: Practically all I did was try to make imaginary worlds come to life, which meant: visible to other people, in comics, designs for buildings, fantasy world maps, board and card games, cassette tapes. So not much time to lose on say, sports. I only specialized in comics when I got to high school. But the goal stays the same, as you said: expanded reality (...man!). No teaching, no explaining, no argument, just a portable world, bound together, with maybe a dust jacket around it or even some leather.

  Paste: Do you ever worry your books are too beautiful?

  Evens: Not that they’re too beautiful, since beauty contains all kinds of drawing, from rough cave drawings to dazzling van Eyck. Sometimes I do worry that by now I master my drawing materials too much, especially the color inks, and that this might make the drawings too affected. It means I often have to provoke surprises and accidents, where before I would stumble into them and have to creatively crawl my way out. I know this answer sounds like the “I’m too much of a perfectionist” answer in a job interview, but then again it was a softball question…

  Paste: I think that was a good answer as far as beauty and such is concerned. Maybe what I was getting at more is: how do you marry horrifying or anguished content and the way it’s presented visually. Do you think it’s possible that your readers get distracted by how darn pretty the pages are and miss some of the darkness they contain?

  Evens: They might. But then maybe the darkness catches up with them later.

• Beat - http://www.comicsbeat.com/174814-2/

  QUOTED: "It was pretty much all there in the first sketches. A girl visited by a magical “panther” who is cute, monstrous-cute, and actually monstrous at the same time. A creature disguised."
  "There are three color schemes in the book: There’s red and blue for the scenes where Panther is out of the picture. Then whenever he turns up he ‘adds yellow’, making all color combinations possible. That’s meant to make the reader miss Panther when he’s not there, and rejoice when he arrives."

  Interview: Belgian Cartoonist Brecht Evens Invokes Fear In a Handful of Colors with PANTHER
  Interview: Belgian Cartoonist Brecht Evens Invokes Fear In a Handful of Colors with PANTHER
  You are here: Home / Culture / Interviews / Interview: Belgian Cartoonist Brecht Evens Invokes Fear In a Handful of Colors with PANTHER

  05/26/2016 5:10 pm by Beat Staff Leave a Comment
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  Over the past few years, cartoonist Brecht Evens has become one of the great Belgian imports thanks to books like The Wrong Place and The Making Of. Evens has a fascinating eye for color, a unique sense of design, and the ability to juggle a large cast of relatable characters. Those fascinating, thoughtful stories though will not necessarily prepare people for his new book.

  PANTHERcover

  Panther, out now from Drawn and Quarterly, is perhaps his strangest and most unsettling book to date. In some ways it looks like and sounds like a children’s book–a girl’s pet cat dies and a magical panther crawls out of her dresser drawer to befriend her. Slowly but steadily, the book grows increasingly dark and treacherous–something that Evens freely admits and takes some pleasure in.

  Alex Dueben: What was the initial idea for the book?

  Brecht Evens: It was pretty much all there in the first sketches. A girl visited by a magical “panther” who is cute, monstrous-cute, and actually monstrous at the same time. A creature disguised.

  Dueben: How did the book change from its original idea to what we’re seeing on the page?

  Evens: The basic idea was solid enough that it seemed I could just fill in the blanks and play with all the possibilities of a creature who has unlimited tools for subterfuge.

  Dueben: Do you typically write the story out in some detail to start, or does the story change a lot as you draw the book?

  Evens: I don’t have a constant method as yet. My other books did tend to change shape a lot in the doing.

  PANTHERinterior_20

  Dueben: Why did you decide to make the book in this particular shape? Were you trying to echo the shape of picture books?

  Evens: Exactly, a book disguised as a children’s book. Which is not to say that I don’t want children to read it–I do.

  Dueben: I’m curious how you think about color and how you decided what colors to use in this book. And did the fact that the book is fantastic change what colors you used?

  Evens: There are three color schemes in the book: There’s red and blue for the scenes where Panther is out of the picture. Then whenever he turns up he ‘adds yellow’, making all color combinations possible. That’s meant to make the reader miss Panther when he’s not there, and rejoice when he arrives, as Christine does. Then there’s the pure black and white pages, where we know that all bets are off.

  PANTHERinterior_25

  Dueben: Reading Panther I was reminded of one of your earlier books, Night Animals, where there are monsters, it’s a plot that could be a children’s story, but it’s not for children. You see to be interested in those sorts of stories.

  Evens: It’s not unusual for me to pick up an old theme and rework it. Night Animals is a two-part book, and the first story, “Bad Friends,” is indeed the progenitor of Panther. “Bad Friends” is at the same time rougher (the girl menstruates and her body changes in a few seconds time, She gets dragged out of her room by a Satyr, her clothes are stripped off and she’s body painted..) and much lighter, more of a parable, since there’s no text and no slow, tense manipulation and seduction going on as there is in Panther. It was more of a bare-bones comment on the modern children story, where monsters are never real monsters.

  Dueben: When you were younger did you like fantastic stories? Did you have imaginary friends?

  Evens: There were no imaginary friends, but tons of fantastic stories.

  Dueben: What has the response been like to the book, because it is different from your previous books? Did people respond well to a fantastic tale of a panther?

  Evens: The response had been about what I wished for, moving on a spectrum from charmed by the disney-cute merchandizable aspect, to troubled and moved, to disgusted, with some grandmothers returning the book to the store, proclaiming it an “apologism for pedophilia, zoophilia and incest.” I disagree with the incest, but I don’t interfere with reader’s interpretations.

  PANTHERinterior_55

  Dueben: I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone but I’m somewhat at a loss to describe it. Can you talk a little about finding that right moment to end the book because it doesn’t entirely resolve.

  Evens: Well, let’s not describe it at all, and maybe not even talk about it!

  Dueben: Fair enough, but can you at least talk about the endpaper of the book, which folds out. Why did you decide to end the book like that?

  Evens: The endpaper continues the ambiguity. There’s a dark, abstract image, but when you fold it open you see Pantherland–“It exists! All the animals and creatures are there! It was all true!” And when you close it, you’re again left with the dark image.

• Comics Journal - http://www.tcj.com/brecht-evens-pantherman/

  QUOTED: "I started dreaming up the book in 2006, when I was 20 years old. By the time I got to actually making the book, I had lived more nightlife and gathered more real, lived or overheard chunks of dialogue and anecdote to replace the more outlandish, noirish parts of the story that no longer rang true. And it has to ring true: you have to believe in the world your creating."

  Brecht Evens: Pantherman
  BY Aug Stone May 26, 2016

  PANTHERcover

  Brecht Evens, Flemish author/artist of the gorgeously stylish The Wrong Place and The Making Of, is back. Considering that his previous works were dazzling and profound looks at group dynamics, this latest offering is somewhat of an anomaly. Brecht’s brushwork has grown even more impressive but story-wise the cast is purposely reduced. Panther tells the tale of how after young Christine’s beloved cat dies, a panther emerges from her bottom drawer and begins to entertain her with accounts of life in Pantherland, where he is crown prince. Taking cues from Christine as to what she wants to hear, Panther also changes his physical appearance at every turn (Brecht doesn’t use panels per se). Soon, with the arrival of other toy animal colleagues, life in this little girl’s room begins to descend into bizarre and uncomfortable territory. Where it remains well past the final page, for

  Panther doesn’t decide, or even resolve, itself so easily. A brilliant book, full of wonder both delightful and malicious, Evens’ has created a masterpiece.

  AUG STONE: Tell me about Panther. It’s disturbing, niggling at the brain in a way I can’t put my finger on yet.

  BRECHT EVENS: Yeah. I can’t totally put my finger on it and I’m not sure I’d want to. I never really plan any message in my books but I felt like I was toying, that there was something sardonic about doing Panther. I had a lot of fun making it, though I’m not sure that’s the vibe that comes across to people. It’s possible that the book might seem darker than the way I felt about it when I was doing it.

  STONE: I saw it as both. Fun, that headed to a very dark place, as fun does sometimes.

  EVENS: Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Exactly.

  STONE: Was there a particular inspiration for it?

  EVENS: There’s two things. It seemed that the basic idea for the story already existed. Years ago I did a book called Night Animals that was translated and published by Top Shelf in 2011. There’s a story in it called ‘Bad Friends’ about a girl being swooped up by a satyr and taken out into the forest. It’s a very short story but there’s already this idea of fun mixed with evil. A very sinister, uncanny vibe. But the Panther character came later. It was actually a character I incarnated for a game with my girlfriend at the time. She was a really fun girl to scare. If I would change my face to something more evil she would right away go ‘oh there’s a very unpleasant game about to start’. I developed many different characters, the cast got bigger and bigger, and the Panther was one of these characters I played, improvising to spook her. Every time she got too frightened, the character might become more humane and get some backstory. Out of all these characters Panther seemed to have a lot of potential and started ending up in my sketchbooks. A lot of the scenes that are in the book were already on paper in 2009. But then I put it away when I started doing The Making Of. Panther might’ve seemed like too simple a story or something.

  PANTHERinterior_15STONE: Was it always the case that Panther would change his appearance so much?

  EVENS: I was just sketching. When you sketch you’re not giving your character a fixed shape anyway and because he’s acting and pretending so much, the sketches came out really differently. A cute one, then a very dark and sinister one. And I saw right away that this would be the way to do it in the book. I think maybe at the time I didn’t have the chops yet to actually do all that in painting, but it came out like that in pen.

  STONE: Panther seems quite surreal to me. Do dreams have much of an influence on you?

  EVENS: (thinks) Then again you might say that about my other books as well. Panther is in a way magical realism, or not even realism I guess, just a magical concept, an unrealistic concept made banal. There’s a German word ‘entzauberung’ – when you take away the magic of something. And it seems like my other books are realistic plots made magical, made – I don’t like to use the word ‘psychedelic’ – but made dream-like. Panther is a book with a magical subject made too close to the skin, too real.

  PANTHERinterior_20

  STONE: Your previous books are all focused on a group of people and the dynamics within that group.

  EVENS: Exactly.

  STONE: Why did you move to a more individual focus with this one?

  EVENS: It has to be very claustrophobic, just these two main characters. It’s the only way to keep it scary, of course. It wasn’t like I was feeling I’ve got to go this way or that way with my career. It was just after The Making Of I was thinking up some really complicated stuff, with no idea where I was going with it. Then I opened up some old sketchbooks, saw Panther, did some more writing on it, and I just flew. It wrote itself mostly, coming really easily. I think Panther is probably going to be a standalone book. What I like to talk about most, what I usually get more inspired by, is city life, groups, and I guess adults. Panther will be different from the others in this way.

  STONE: There is somewhat of a group setting towards the end when the other animals come out of the drawer. But unlike your other work where we can feel and empathize with the character types – something we can even do with the Panther to an extent – these animals are genuinely creepy. Their human qualities, if there are any human qualities present, are very abnormal.

  EVENS: Yes. They get less and less human. There’s some that don’t even speak. They just seem like stuffed animals filled up with something…we don’t even really know what’s behind their skin. Panther is the most human one, or the one who has best prepared himself for the human world. When I wrote it I wanted to make it feel like he educated himself a bit, like he gave himself a basic course in children’s stories before popping out of the closet. And then when Bonzo comes out, he’s way less prepared. He didn’t crunch for the exam, he doesn’t know how to talk to a kid. And the other ones are just (thinks) crappily put together. They seem like they just pulled on some shape right before emerging into this world.

  Originally I felt the rest of the characters might be the others I played for my girlfriend. But I made it a little more toy-like, a little more Tim Burton maybe. What makes the book interesting and special to me, what seemed necessary, was a reaction to a lot of stories where monsters always end up being part of an escapist world, where they become the friends of the children. That’s probably a modern thing, like in Pan’s Labyrinth, a movie that I love actually. Even in Maurice Sendak for example, the monsters get to be playmates really fast. While writing the story I felt the pull that all these writers must feel of making him a protector at the end. And that would’ve been doing the Pan’s Labyrinth thing, the Sendak thing. And because I love the character Panther it was difficult to keep him away from that. I had to keep him an asshole to the end.

  STONE: How do you see the progression of your books, from book to book?

  EVENS: There’s definitely a huge leap in Panther with how I did the characters. I never had that much fun drawing a character. Also at some point I was preparing an expo and I had an original page of The Wrong Place lying next to an original page of Panther, and Panther looked sharp, really defined by contrast next to The Wrong Place where it was really blunt, very misty. Panther was really commanding the page more.

  STONE: How do you feel about The Wrong Place and The Making Of looking back at them now?

  EVENS: A lot of affection. I don’t know if I can read it like a normal reader would because when I look at a page I know where I was, what city I was living in, what music I was listening to. It’s another experience. I love the books. With The Wrong Place there’s a lot of great memories doing the drawing because there’s this clumsiness, which sometimes I regret losing. I feel like there’s always danger imminent in mastering your materials too much and I definitely hadn’t yet (laughs). When I started on The Wrong Place I was really still messing around. And a lot of things that worked out started working out only while doing the drawing, I didn’t always know what I was doing. So it’s exciting for me to look at those drawings. And I have a lot of affection for The Making Of. I really like the story. I put a lot of energy into that. It’s far from perfect but… I did so much more work on the writing than I did on The Wrong Place and Panther. I have maybe six quite defined characters, which in a comic book seemed like an achievement. In The Wrong Place I have affection for the characters too but it’s a mean-spirited world. Very anchored in puberty. I made it when I was 22, with an adolescent view of the world where popular and unpopular are what makes it turn. And this started changing in The Making Of.

  PANTHERinterior_25

  STONE: What are you working on next?

  EVENS: A big book called ‘The City Of Belgium’. I’m already drawing it and the problem is for every page I draw, I write two more. So the end is getting farther and farther and farther the more I work on it. It returns to The Wrong Place universe, a more adult version of this. We’re in the city again, at night, and we have three different characters having parallel adventures. I’m a big fan of John Cassavettes and his work will probably inspire this new book in some way. With cinema, I take inspiration, not so much visually, but definitely from the storytelling. His characters are never made to go to a specific point, you never know what’s gonna happen in the moment or where you’re gonna be 20 seconds later. That’s really magical.

  STONE: In an old interview you spoke of experiencing life to make your stories ring more true. How do you feel about that now?

  EVENS: Well, I don’t normally have a very adventurous reflex. I go to the same three bars, I have very routine habits. But in the last ten years adventure found me most of the time (laughs) Which is a very happy coincidence for a writer. So some crazy stuff came and found me, and of course you keep your ears open to any stories your friends tell you. I still feel like I have to know what I’m talking about, I need to give myself the right to talk about something. For example, in Panther, something that worried me in the writing was I’m depicting a kid, and I don’t have kids. So I was checking a lot with people – ‘you have a daughter, would she do this? Is this how she’d say this?’

  STONE: Do you find experiencing life to create art dangerous at all?

  EVENS: That’s the thing, I’m not provoking it. The book I’m writing now is influenced by the bi-polar episode I had, which I didn’t see coming. It was provoked by taking amphetamines, party drugs. A pretty routine thing to do, just taking drugs, there’s nothing adventurous about it. You arrange your life around these parties with the same people and the same places because that works with your drug. That in itself is not an adventure. The thing is that apparently I am prone to getting manic episodes. So I had this big rebound, and that was hugely interesting. That’s a good example of adventure finding me.

  I’ve been living in Paris since about 2013. It’s great, I can just put myself in a chair somewhere where adventure might find me. And I’m getting other cultural influences living in France that I wouldn’t normally seek out. For me, I’m steeped in Hollywood and American culture. Like a lot of people from Flanders, we learned English from The Simpsons. And I listen to a lot of American music. When I draw I really really love hip-hop, party-music. I don’t sit down a lot when I’m drawing, I’m mostly moving around the room, looking at the drawing from afar. The brush on paper is just moments, then I stand up again and look at it from afar. And I dance throughout, something of a tribal thing, to wake me up.

  STONE: Do you listen to Nick Cave?

  EVENS: Yeah, a lot. He’s a genius.

  STONE: I’ve always thought you look like a young Nick Cave.

  EVENS: It’s not useful to just look like a genius (laughs heartily). I’d rather be a genius and look like an actor. It’s not really gonna rub off on you.

  STONE: I’m always surprised by your endings. You have a knack of knowing where to leave things so a lot of wonder still continues in the reader’s mind. How do you know when your stories end?

  EVENS: I wonder if that’s a good thing or not. With Panther especially, I didn’t feel like an ending that ties it up, that explains. Like when you finish a piano piece but you use the pedals, the sound stills goes on a bit. Even though the piece has been played, it has to keep running on. You shouldn’t be able to close the book and go do your dishes without something haunting you.

  Oh, Youth: An Interview with Brecht Evens
  BY Sophie Yanow May 25, 2011

  Brecht Evens’ characters judge, love, party and gossip, in his lauded 2010 graphic novel, The Wrong Place. Most of us who encountered the work last year had little context for its author, but lately he’s been on everyone’s lips (almost literally, according to Pascal Girard’s recent diary comics, where Evens’ penchant for cheek-kissing and his party antics at MoCCA 2011 are recounted with fascination and bemusement). Despite what readers may think (between the setting of The Wrong Place, and Girard’s diary), Evens did not produce his lengthy graphic novel between drinks, in the bathroom of a nightclub. We’ll hear from Evens himself about work and play in Belgium, but first there’s the medieval city where his painting came to life.

  I had the pleasure of visiting Gent completely by accident in 2008. Eating dinner at a squat in Amsterdam, I saw a poster for an Alternative Bookfair. On a whim, my traveling companion and I decided to go, and after locating Gent on a map (it’s in northwest Belgium), we found some hosts online and hitchhiked there a few days later. The fair was a bust, but the sleepy town captivated me completely. A river runs through the city; lampposts are topped with St Michael the dragon slayer defeating his foe; and a castle sits at city center. We walked past Sint-Lucas Visual Arts as our hosts showed us around town; “This is a very well respected art school, but I think you have to speak Dutch…” We wandered on and visited a comic shop. Meanwhile, back at Sint-Lucas, Brecht Evens was hard at work. His lengthy commitment to making comics has led him through many styles; but it was his enrollment in Sint-Lucas, and in particular the critical guidance of his mentor, the painter Goele Dewanckel, that really pushed him to explore alternative tools and methods and eventually ditch the pen for a paintbrush. In his five years of study, he went from making comedic genre fiction to a 180-page dance of characters and colors, his final school project; what we in the English-speaking world have come to know as The Wrong Place.

  Evens is hesitant to call himself a part of a “scene,” citing his international outlook. However, this outlook seems to characterize a group of young, upcoming Belgian cartoonists, whose work is cross-pollinated by many art forms and locales: Evens’ former classmate and friend Brecht Vandenbroucke has found an international presence online and in various publications through the likes of England’s Nobrow Press and the Latvian anthology KUS!; former Brussels inhabitant and fellow Belgian Olivier Schrauwen is poised for the release of a full-length English graphic novel through Fantagraphics; not to mention Evens’ friend and another mentor, Randall C, whose book Sleepyheads has just been translated and released by Blank Slate. With an implicit cultural immersion in the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, access to modestly priced public arts education, and the ability to make a living through their work and state grants, these artists are able to explore their own voice and potential to the fullest. Multilingualism abounds; Evens’ own ability as a polyglot leaves almost no work unreadable and no opportunity lost. Within this framework, Evens has produced magnificent comics, of which I’m sure there are only more to come.

  Born in 1986, Evens is a young artist. Part of what makes his youthfulness significant is that he belongs to a generation that grew up with the Internet, and thus one can follow almost his entire artistic formation through his website and blog, with commentary in Flemish. With online translators these days, even that is not a huge impediment. Evens candidly displays his past work in a timeline on his website, from childhood scribbles to genre fantasy to the “stoner” comics of his adolescence. Evens’ online presence certainly contributed to his international rise. The Dutch edition of The Wrong Place, Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (Somewhere you don’t want to be), was published by Oogachtend, which had already published a few of his previous works. His entry into the French market was another story. Thomas Gabison, an editor at Actes Sud BD (the comics division of a larger publisher), found Evens’ work on an American website, and followed a path of links back to Evens’ blog, where he saw images of the Escher-esque staircase that would eventually grace the cover of The Wrong Place. Evens was still in school at the time, finishing work on the book under the guidance of Dewanckel. Gabison inquired as to whether Evens was working on a graphic novel, and was shown more work soon after, at a book festival. Impressed by what he saw, and with help from the Flemish Literature Fund, the book was published in 2010 as Les Noceurs.

  In Les Noceurs, characters traipse through dazzling nightclub scenes and bedrooms, appearing many times per page in a Winsor McCay like manner, foregoing bounding box and gutter. Rhythmic, gridded passages creep in and out through the book; small personal moments are foregrounded on pure white. Evens’ transparent inks layer to show movement, ambience, passions and chills, as color-coded voices are thrown across the page. His work displays both subtlety and visual intricacy, with the intent of a practiced artist.

  Les Noceurs quickly gained critical acclaim, and was soon published in English by Drawn & Quarterly as The Wrong Place. At Angoulême 2011, the French edition took home the “Prix de l’Audace,” a relatively new but fitting prize for “audacious” works. Evens has also been nominated for an Eisner for Best Painter/Multimedia artist for The Wrong Place.

  Evens was kind and patient as we conducted this interview via e-mail over the course of the last two months. Evens now lives and works in Brussels.

  – Sophie Yanow

  SOPHIE YANOW: Can you talk about your early exposure and forays into comics?

  BRECHT EVENS: My sister Sara and I read and reread our Franco-Belgian comics every day after school. She’s four years older than me and she taught me to read and write. She’s a language teacher now, like my parents. I started drawing comics in kindergarten: the characters were stickmen. Sara re-drew some of these more pretty and elaborate, until I felt I surpassed her as a draftsman. After that, we still worked together sometimes, but I was a very arrogant and difficult little artist to work with.

  YANOW: Which comics were you reading?

  EVENS: Tintin, Suske & Wiske, Kiekeboe, Urbanus,…

  YANOW: Did your parents encourage you on your path as an artist and cartoonist?

  EVENS: I couldn’t imagine more encouraging, supportive parents. Also, we read and traveled a lot. My mother draws well, and my father, Jos, wrote some stories and plays, which I couldn’t bear to read (because of sex scenes written by my dad). He improvised stories to tell us on camping trips, ending every daily installment with a cliffhanger, until we became too adolescent an audience and had to switch to Whist. We even had to stop mid-story then. I think the story was about mysterious natural phenomena, omens and premonitions of we’ll never know what.

  YANOW: Whist, as in the card game?

  EVENS: Yes.

  YANOW: So do you find traces of these early stories creeping into your work at all?

  EVENS: If they have anything in common? Maybe… They were always stories about failure.

  YANOW: Do you feel connected to a particular “old guard” of European cartoonists?

  EVENS: They probably have a big unconscious influence, having read them so much as a kid. But now I mostly look at painters and writers — and maybe cinema, though I’m more suspicious of cinema’s influence. As much as possible I want to avoid making cinema on paper, with frames, “camera angles” and images that are photographic.

  YANOW: Which painters and writers are you excited about right now?

  EVENS: Lately I’ve been excited about David Hockney, Saul Steinberg and medieval/Eastern drawings, and I’m reading Albert Cohen’s’ Belle du Seigneur (for what must be months now).

  YANOW: What excites you about them?

  EVENS: The original forms, shapes: the tweaking of perspective to serve the picture, to show more. In Hockney and the medieval artists there’s a personal, unconventional synthesis of nature.

  BELGIUM

  YANOW: I want to help readers further contextualize your work a little bit. Describe a day and a night in Belgium. Feel free to take the train between Gent and Brussels.

  EVENS: I take that train a lot: it’s only 30 minutes. But let’s stick with a lonelier day in Brussels. Get up around 1pm: read e-mails and ponder over occasional paperwork. Do shopping. Breathe deeply and go to the atelier around 5pm. Pace back and forth on the roof. Work picks up speed at sundown. Work loses speed around 1am. Go home, maybe a drink in the very late-night bar on the corner, strike up or avoid conversation. At home, watch series and eat. Fall asleep reading/digesting around 6am.

  YANOW: You’ve mentioned your mentors in Gent, Goele Dewanckel and Randall C, were responsible for “kicking open doors in [your] head,” as well as your former classmate Brecht Vandenbroucke, and nearby cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen. How important is an artistic community to you?

  EVENS: It keeps me sharp. I need people who look at my work with a skeptic frown, slightly biting their lower lip, so I too take a fresh, worried look. But it’s only natural that a lot of my friends are artists or the like, work and social life go in the same blender. Conversation in my artistic community is roughly 80% love life, 40% art (there’s overlap). I sporadically seek out Goele, my former illustration teacher, to get a proper evaluation. Randall and Brecht are important. Olivier, alas, lives in Berlin, and he mumbles.

  YANOW: You went to school for illustration, despite the fact that there are many comics-oriented programs in Europe. You’ve said that you would encourage others to avoid these comics programs in favor of illustration programs. Can you elaborate?

  EVENS: It’s not so much about studying illustration vs. studying comics. You need your education to give you a wide scope. In illustration we also looked at comics. You just need to find good, demanding teachers wherever they are. At Sint-Lucas Gent, illustration smelled like more of a challenge, and it was. I only started getting it right in the final (fourth) year, when I started to work on The Wrong Place. Night Animals was made before that, in 2007, and is still a bit sterile in comparison.

  YANOW: I imagine “getting it right” must have involved a lot of experimentation. You drew a 24-Hour comic in between Vincent (2006) and Night Animals (2007). Was that your first “performance comic” of this type? Did it change your process on later projects?

  EVENS: Which comic are you talking about?

  YANOW: I believe it was called Droom Met De Zeevruchten (“Dream with Seafood”). I know you also had a later one that was painted on a long scroll.

  EVENS: Oh, yeah! It was a dream I had, with seafood as the fruits of freedom. A very tall girl in a police uniform offered me a plate and said, “Take a mussel, you have to taste it once in your life.” But the mussel got blubbery as I tried to pick it out of the shell. I’m forgetting what the question was… Ah, process! Working at high speed is a useful experiment; you stumble upon new solutions. I stopped making elaborate pencil-sketches around that time.

  YANOW: So you transitioned to a more immediate way of working. What happened instead of the sketches?

  EVENS: For Night Animals I started drawing directly in ink. For The Wrong Place I worked in direct color, working my way up from light colors to darker colors, making many little decisions on the way. When I make a drawing now, I don’t know what it will look like until it’s finished.

  YANOW: You produced Night Animals while you were studying abroad. What was it like making work in a new environment, without the same support structure?

  EVENS: I studied in Barcelona for six months. A lot of people in that class made comics, which probably helped to erase the imaginary border between comics and illustration.

  YANOW: Were these students also interested in a non-cinematic approach?

  EVENS: I can’t remember discussing it, but their work did not have any annoying camera-effects. In Barcelona I got to know the work of Clara-Tanit Arqué, Alberto Vazquez, Martin Romero, …

  YANOW: The opening scene in The Wrong Place was based on one of your earlier short stories, which you’ve said was “more judgmental.” Can you talk about the first iteration of the story and its origins?

  EVENS: The original short story was called “Waiting for Robbie,” published in Hic Sunt Leones 2 in 2007. It was what I had in mind for the rest of The Wrong Place that was more judgmental, not that first scene. “Waiting for Robbie” had only three characters, the host and two guests, plus every time the host calls Robbie you hear Robbie’s voice and enticing sounds in the background. And it had more of a gag-punch line ending.

  YANOW: Your love life is clearly pretty important to you. You’ve said, for example, that the story for The Wrong Place changed drastically after you began having one-night stands. So why did this change affect the story and the way you felt about the different characters?

  EVENS: Of course my love life is important to me! But I was making a broader point, I hope: I started dreaming up the book in 2006, when I was 20 years old. By the time I got to actually making the book, I had lived more nightlife and gathered more real, lived or overheard chunks of dialogue and anecdote to replace the more outlandish, noirish parts of the story that no longer rang true. And it has to ring true: you have to believe in the world your creating.

  YANOW: In The Wrong Place, you’ve said you feel that the characters’ identities are often made up for them by others. Do you feel that way about your own identity? About identity in general?

  EVENS: Yeah. To speak for myself, I feel like my identity is a story that me and a lot of other people made up together. Most adjectives we would use to describe ourselves only have meaning in a comparison with other people. But we should probably say ‘image’? The book has the characters projecting an image on each other, and attempting to control their own image. The image we have of ourselves and the image other people have of us interact. My father is my Father to me, a particular package. When he is with me a part of him is probably looking at himself through my eyes, and this will make him feel like my Father. While answering your questions I feel like the Author, which makes me say things like “I was making a broader point.” An hour ago I felt like the Stranger at the Laundromat.

  YANOW: Can you talk about the process of drawing scenes and creating characters for The Wrong Place? Of course you needed to do some planning before painting a page, but did the story flow from exploring these scenes with the characters, or did you already know the ending when you began?

  EVENS: I decided on the ending somewhere halfway. Most of the scenes were drawn right after I wrote them, which is good because with the dialogue fresh and alive in my head it was easier to get the expressions and gestures right. I think I gave myself a lot of freedom to just let the story flow from what I thought the characters would do. You can draw out a plot, then write the characters until they come alive, look back at the plot and think, “Nah, he wouldn’t,” and take sides with the character rather than the plot.

  NEW WORK

  YANOW: You’ve gone back to creating sword-and-sorcery fantasy comics in a strip called Idulfania. After a long break from this kind of work, what compelled you to return to it?

  EVENS: I was asked to do short three-panel comics for a Brussels newspaper, for the kids’ page. The target age for these comics is 9-13, and I was easily pulled into any kind of fantasy at that age. I try to avoid making “fantasy-jokes,” parody that only refers to fantasy. But I’m all for dumb jokes.

  YANOW: There definitely seems to be a tide of meta-narrative when it comes to fantasy comics these days. Do you think you’d ever try to pursue a more “adult” story in a setting like this?

  EVENS: The PictureBox people, like Brian Chippendale, Lauren Weinstein, CF, are great at this. I love their work; they create beautiful worlds. I don’t think I’m going to do a story in a fantasy or SF setting, but in a way the disco in The Wrong Place already is a fantasy world, an infinite, impossible building, like the spaces in our dreams.

  YANOW: Have you had exposure to a lot of “alt” comics creators from the U.S.? Is it easy to get this stuff over there?

  EVENS: Yes, as far as I know. We have good comic shops.

  YANOW: Could you describe the themes or story of your next long book, The Making Of?

  EVENS: It’s about events taking place at a small-town art festival, and it’s a more plot-driven story. But the same things have excited me this time; searching how to arrange things on a page (how to “show everything”) and showing people behaving in ways. There’s a lot of plants, that’s why I was looking at David Hockney and the Eastern art.

  YANOW: Your comics often take place at parties or festivals; you’ve done plenty of fun experimental comics and you’ve also participated in what I might call “comics concerts,” where you draw while a band plays. How important is “play” in your work?

  EVENS: Work is like play, serious play. When a kid plays he’s pretty serious about it. I like what Lynda Barry says about this, about “deep play,” where the puppets come alive. And another thing I read about play, about computer games, also applies: That the fun is in the right proportion of new challenges and doing what you already master.

  YANOW: Why is the new project called The Making Of…? Do you usually name your projects before they’re finished?

  EVENS: Yes. Someone in the book takes pictures of the buildup to the art festival; she documents the “making of.” And the word has a wider resonance.

  YANOW: You received a grant from the Flemish Literature Fund for your last book. Will they continue to help you for the publication The Making Of…?

  EVENS: Yes. I can work on the book almost full-time, thanks to another grant.

  YANOW: How has your creative process changed for this story?

  EVENS: I made a complete storyboard beforehand. (A decoupage, how would you call that?) And then changed most of it in the process of drawing, but with that storyboard to start from. It was fun, making that storyboard.

  YANOW: You’ve been nominated for an Eisner. You’ve already received the relatively new prize for “audacious” works from Angoulême. What’s your reaction to these awards and nominations?

  EVENS: It’s encouraging. And I love to tell my parents, who keep press clippings.

• Publisher -

  Belgian cartoonist Brecht Evens was born in 1986 and studied illustration in Ghent, Belgium. Important mentors were his illustration teacher Goele Dewanckel and cartoonist/comedy coach/zen master Randall Casaer.

  His debut comic book, A Delivery from Outer Space, was released in 2005. The slightly melodramatic Vincent was released in 2006, followed in 2007 by a little nocturnal fantasy called Night Animals. The Wrong Place (2009), started out as a graduation project and was a departure from the more typical comic art of his earlier books. It won the Haarlem Comic Festival's Willy Vandersteen Award for best Dutch-language graphic novel, and an award at the Angouleme International Comics Festival.

  Brecht lives in Paris, where he lives off illustration work and Flemish cartoonist grants.
  Best U.S. Edition of International Material
  Eisner Award for The Making Of (2013, nom.)
  Best Painter
  Eisner Award for The Making Of (2013, nom.)
  Sélection officielle
  Festival de la BD d'Angoulême for The Making Of (2012, nom.)
  Prix de l’Audace
  Festival de la BD d'Angoulême for The Wrong Place (2011)
  Best Painter
  Eisner Award for The Wrong Place (2011, nom.)

• Brecht Evens Home Page - http://www.brechtevens.com/

  Born 1986 in Hasselt, Belgium

  Studied Illustration at Sint-lucas Beeldende Kunst in Ghent, Belgium, 2004-2008

  Now living in Paris

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: no2011061151

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Evens, Brecht, 1986-

  Associated country:
  Belgium

  Birth date: 1986

  Field of activity: Illustration of books Graphic novels

  Affiliation: Sint-Lucas Visual Arts Ghent

  Profession or occupation:
  Illustrators Cartoonists

  Found in: Wrong place, 2010: t.p. (Brecht Evens)
  Top Shelf Productions website, April 7, 2011 (Brecht Evens
  born 1986; studied illustration in Ghent, Belgium)
  Brecht Evens blogspot WWW site, January 8, 2015 (Brecht
  Evens is a cartoonist and illustrator; lives in Paris;
  studied at Sint-Lucas Beeldende Kunst Gent)

  Associated language:
  dut

QUOTED: "a dark fairy tale filled with troubling implications and haunting illustrations."

Panther
Publishers Weekly. 263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:

Panther Brecht Evens, trans from the French by Laura Watkinson and Michele Hutchinson. Drawn & Quarterly, $26.95 (120p) ISBN 978-1-77046226-7

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Suburban schoolgirl Christine loses her ' cat, only to gain Panther, an imaginary, talking feline friend who can transform at will, in this unsettling examination of grief by Evens (The Wrong Place). Panther's interactions with Christine grow from impish (dancing until she's dizzy) to downright disturbing when his own dangerous friends arrive, bringing a darker tone with them, as Christine explores her feelings of loss with these figments of her imagination. Evens's riot of lines and colors resemble Scott Morse in their symbolic representations and nonsense watercolor layering, which ignores borders. The visuals are Escheresque or art deco or both, thrown together as if in a kaleidoscope of shapes and half-familiar images and colors. When Panther touches Christine and woos her with words, the effect is chilling. A dark fairy tale filled with troubling implications and haunting illustrations. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Panther." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902717&it=r&asid=79941f08e89df83b28ed1f5c70b25e99. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

QUOTED: "beautiful, frame-worthy art and astute commentary on the listlessness of youth."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A448902717
Evens, Brecht. The Wrong Place
Ingrid Bohnenkamp
Xpress Reviews. (June 17, 2011):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:

[star] Evens, Brecht. The Wrong Place. Drawn & Quarterly. 2010. 176p. illus. ISBN 9781770460010. pap. $24.95. F

In his first English-language graphic novel, Belgian artist and musician Evens presents readers with a lushly illustrated, heartbreaking portrait of two twentysomethings living in a nameless city. Everyone who crosses paths with mysterious, free-spirited Robbie instantly falls in love; women want to capture his heart, while men go to barber shops with his photo requesting the same haircut. Robbie's childhood friend Gary has his life together, but it isn't much fun: he's luckless in love and people only come to his parties if they think Robbie will make an appearance. When the two men meet for drinks, Gary's fear of letting go and seizing the day becomes painfully obvious. Evens uses color to tell the part of the story the words don't capture--Robbie is a vivid blue, Gary is a drab gray, and the eccentric characters they meet as they roam the dreamlike bars, streets, and apartments of the city fall somewhere in between.

Verdict With beautiful, frame-worthy art and astute commentary on the listlessness of youth, this graphic novel won't be easy to tuck back onto the shelf. Highly recommended for adult collections.--Ingrid Bohnenkamp, Portland P.L., ME

Bohnenkamp, Ingrid
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bohnenkamp, Ingrid. "Evens, Brecht. The Wrong Place." Xpress Reviews, 17 June 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA259842351&it=r&asid=2752e8a1ef938365365f89610f3ff96c. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

QUOTED: "The intricate visual language ... draw[s] the reader into a deceptively straightforward story."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A259842351
Evens, Brecht. The Making Of
Emilia Packard
Xpress Reviews. (Jan. 4, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:

Evens, Brecht. The Making Of. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. 160p. tr. from Dutch by Laura Watkinson & Michele Hutchison. ISBN 9781770460737. $29.95. F

A graphic novel done entirely in watercolor celebrates the versatility and edginess of an often mild medium. The intricate visual language of overlapping figures and structures, with frequent explosions of flora, fauna, and fire, draw the reader into a deceptively straightforward story. A big-city artist participates in a small-town art show, where he meets the salt-of-the-earth show organizer, a spiral drawing psychotic, a tag along with alien eyes, and an ingenue documenting their artistic process. The artist grows impatient with the amateurs and rallies everyone to create a colossal sculpture of a garden gnome. He also has a pleasant tryst with the ingenue. At the story's core are compelling questions about the cynicism and hope that fuel the artistic process.

Verdict A bold statement about the medium as message--simultaneously surreal and organic--Evens's watercolors reveal how art can be as natural as breathing and as unpredictable as a summer storm. For art lovers moonlighting as graphic novel fans and for graphic novel fans willing to dive into a foreign and lovely world of visual language.--Emilia Packard, Bloomington, IN

Packard, Emilia
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Packard, Emilia. "Evens, Brecht. The Making Of." Xpress Reviews, 4 Jan. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA316317527&it=r&asid=4486d47e1de64022d5631ae167e87dab. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A316317527

"Panther." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA448902717&asid=79941f08e89df83b28ed1f5c70b25e99. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017. Bohnenkamp, Ingrid. "Evens, Brecht. The Wrong Place." Xpress Reviews, 17 June 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA259842351&asid=2752e8a1ef938365365f89610f3ff96c. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017. Packard, Emilia. "Evens, Brecht. The Making Of." Xpress Reviews, 4 Jan. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA316317527&asid=4486d47e1de64022d5631ae167e87dab. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

• Broken Frontier
  http://www.brokenfrontier.com/brecht-evens-panter-panther-review/
  Word count: 712

  QUOTED: "Panther is the book where Brecht Evens reaches his full potential. An ambitious, ambiguous phantasmagorical tale that examines innocence on various levels, and which involves the reader in the story to such a degree that he or she has to fill in the blanks from their own psyche to have the story come to a full resolution."

  Belgian Wunderkind Brecht Evens Transcends Himself with his Stunning and Complex OGN ‘Panther’

  by Bart Croonenborghs
  February 3, 2015

  4
  8

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens
  Brecht Evens makes iconoclastic graphic novels and is responsible for a whole new wave of alternative artists riding international success in his wake. His previous graphic novels The Wrong Place and The Making Of (both published in English by Drawn & Quarterly and covered on Broken Frontier) were very good but there was always one essential key component that was lacking: a solid story. His new OGN Panther fixes this with stunning ambiguity.

  Panther, the crown prince of the kingdom of Pantheria, crawls out of the cupboard of little Christine after the death of her cat. But who or what is Panther, as he sets about seducing Christine and a game unfolds between the charmer and his prey?

  It seems like a slight description for a 120-page graphic novel, but rest assured that Panther grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the exploding last page, where more questions are raised than answered. However, Evens still manages to find some sort of a resolution – even though it is a quite unsettling one.

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens

  What Evens manages to pull off here is a psychological thriller with a superb storytelling rhythm: a game played as much between Panther and Christine as between the reader and Panther. What starts out innocently enough morphs into a rather sinister play where one is never sure what exactly is going on and what Panther’s purpose is. That is until Christine’s pet bear Bozo disappears and everything starts to spiral down towards the end, and even then Evens suggests more than he explicitly shows.

  Are we watching the degrading psyche of a (roughly) five year old due to the death of her cat? Are we exploring a metaphorical game of cat and mouse between a sexual predator and a child? Is the whole of the OGN an allegory for sexual awakening? I promise you that a game of Twister never looked as menacing as in Panther.

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens

  Panther is a laudable example of visual storytelling where you can’t separate text from the visuals. Evens’ design for Panther continues to morph and transform depending on the meaning behind the words or situation. It is an endlessly inventive opera where the artist dips as much into his own imagination as into pop culture: from realistic to cartoony, from a Maurice Sendak creation to the sinister grin of the Cheshire Cat, from sphinx to Chinese dragon, from Bill Watterson to Tex Avery.

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens

  Evens’ art is deepened even further; his inventive approach with no panel bordering, diagram cutouts of cars and houses and flexible body language is enhanced by his iconoclastic use of color and the blending of realistic and cartoony line work, which is more assured than in his previous books. A few times he breaks the mold by including full-bleed spreads displaying a masterful eye towards composition and coloring. It truly looks like nothing else in the comics world.

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens

  Panter/ Panther by Brecht Evens

  Panther is the book where Brecht Evens reaches his full potential. An ambitious, ambiguous phantasmagorical tale that examines innocence on various levels, and which involves the reader in the story to such a degree that he or she has to fill in the blanks from their own psyche to have the story come to a full resolution. A true masterpiece, and one I hope that Drawn & Quarterly snatches up quickly for translation.

• Comics Alliance
  http://comicsalliance.com/brecht-evens-panther-review/
  Word count: 1069

  QUOTED: "It’s a tour de force of a sequential art story—and with Evens, the 'art' in the term 'sequential art should be taken to mean fine art as well as cartooning—though the subject matter ensures that this is not a book for everyone. If you can face it, though, you should read it."

  Imaginary Friends Turn Fiends In Brecht Evens’ Harrowing ‘Panther’
  by J. Caleb Mozzocco May 12, 2016 9:00 AM
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  PANTHERcover

  I just read one of the most remarkable comics that I’ve experienced in recent memory and, as is often the case when I read a really great comic, I wanted immediately to tell everyone about it and suggest they seek it out to experience it for themselves.

  When I sat down at my computer to do just that, however, I found that this particular book, Brecht Evens‘ Panther, presents a challenge to the critic. The subject matter is as dark and disturbing as it can get, but a large part of the book’s power is the way that Evens only very gradually reveals what’s really going on. Panther seems slightly off, then hints, then suggests, and ultimately demonstrates that something sinister and sickening is going on, before a somewhat equivocal ending that implies it’s far worse than one initially thought.

  So when exactly does a trigger warning become a spoiler? Knowing what Panther is about robs it of its tonal shock, but ignorance of the narrative gut-punches ahead could lead readers who would rather avoid the topic entirely to find themselves facing some of the toughest stuff to deal with.

  PANTHERinterior_21

  Perhaps a reader should take this as forewarning, then, and consider themselves forearmed as I lay out exactly what this book is about. This is the best, most accessible, most compelling comic from the Belgian cartoonist responsible for The Wrong Place and The Making Of…. It is also a book about the sexual abuse of a child.

  Young Christine lives alone with her father and beloved but sick cat, Lucy. When Lucy goes to the vet and never comes back, Christine is despondent, until she receives a visit from a new feline friend. The bottom drawer of her dresser opens of its own accord and a cloud of magical, colorful spots seep out. And then out steps a huge leopard wearing a waistcoat and bow tie.

  This is Panther, crown prince of magical Pantherland, and he has come because he heard Christine crying. Over the next nine pages pages he regales Christine with tales of Pantherland until she falls asleep. Brecht’s borderless water colors — there are no physical panels, only implied ones — grow in number throughout the sequence, the characters’ dialogue similarly unconstrained by dialogue bubbles, but floating above them, and distinguished by style. (Panther speaks in green cursive, Christine in tight, story book red.)

  PANTHERinterior_23

  To call Brecht’s Panther character amorphous is to sell it short. He looks different in every single image. Not only does his coloration and species seem to change — this leopard really can change his spots — but so too does the style in which he’s drawn. He’ll look like different cats from throughout fine art and pop culture history. He resembles ancient statuary or a heraldic symbol, but he’s also the Pink Panther, The Cheshire Cat, Bill Waterson’s Hobbes, Tex Avery’s cartoon cats, a Maurice Sendak Wild Thing, and deliriously on and on.

  Throughout this initial sequence, it’s clear the lengths that Panther is going to in order to make Christine happy, changing his stories about Pantherland on the spot to suit her whims, reversing himself if they seem too scary or to offend her sensibilities. It ends oddly, with a full-page splash of the large, now dark Panther regarding the sleeping Christine, and the now dark room full of the abstracted shapes of overlapping one another, with Brecht’s cartooning of the previous pages resulting in a piece of art of the sort that one is more likely to find in a gallery than a comic book.

  Things get weirder still when Christine’s stuffed animal Bonzo disappears… and then returns, out of the drawer from Pantherland, but quite different, quite changed. “Let’s fool around!” he declares during a tea party, and Panther hushes him. Bonzo is weird and violent, and has an unhealthy interest in Christine, with none of the subtlety or imagination of Panther.

  PANTHERinterior_24

  Things come to a horrifying head on Christine’s birthday, when a small contingent of bizarre visitors from Panteherland emerge from the drawer to have a party with Christine, and they are all terribly unsuited to Panther’s particular game. This culminates in the only on-page scene of abuse that Evens actually depicts, rather than implies.

  As I mentioned, the book’s final pages are more disturbing still, as it becomes clear that Panther may be only the imaginary aspect of a real character in the story, and we watch him retreat into the portal to Pantherland, where he transforms into abstracted black and white shapes that coalesce into tiger stripes.. An almost hidden fold-out page reveals Pantherland itself, in all it’s brilliantly-colored, obsessively detailed glory.

  It’s a tour de force of a sequential art story — and with Evens, the “art” in the term “sequential art” should be taken to mean fine art as well as cartooning — though the subject matter ensures that this is not a book for everyone. If you can face it, though, you should read it. As Vladimir Nabokov proved long ago with prose, a work can still be a masterpiece, even if its subject matter is reprehensible.

  I don’t know that I’d go so far as to compare Panther to Lolita, of course, aside from noting that they are both excellent works about monsters. But is Evens’ latest work a masterpiece? It’s a strong word that a critic should always be careful in breaking out, but I think Panther earns it.

  Read More: Imaginary Friends Turn Fiends In Brecht Evens' 'Panther' | http://comicsalliance.com/brecht-evens-panther-review/?trackback=tsmclip

• Montreal Review of Books
  http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/v4/reviews/panther/
  Word count: 754

  QUOTED: "In his anti-cinematic approach, with no panel divisions, where each page is visually mesmerizing, Evens succeeds in creating a book that is an art object, ingeniously exploring the flat medium of paper by giving it depth through a delicate layering of images and meanings."

  Fantastical Feline
  February 18, 2016 • Review by Eloisa Aquino • Filed in Blog Review • Leave a comment

  Panther, by cartoonist Brecht Evens, is a colourful and sombre psychological thriller about the troubling relationship between a small girl and a fantastical creature.

  The young Belgian artist (born in 1986) is well known in the world of alternative comics. From a country celebrated for its rich comics tradition, Evens studied illustration in Ghent and is part of a scene that includes the iconoclast Brecht Vandenbroucke (also published by Drawn & Quarterly) and the innovative Olivier Schrauwen (who is with Fantagraphics). He received the prestigious Angoulême prize in 2011 and has also been nominated for an Eisner (arguably the highest honour for a comic book artist) for Best Painter/Multimedia artist. Evens has shown in his previous books, The Wrong Place and The Making Of (both D&Q) that he is a virtuoso with an exuberant style, unique in the graphic novel world.

  Panther
  Brecht Evens

  Drawn & Quarterly
  $32.95
  cloth
  120pp
  9781770462267
  Panther reinforces this perception, and it is Evens’s darkest graphic novel yet. His signature concoction of exploding colour, melancholy, and, particularly in this book, horror, makes for impressive stuff that can hold the attention for hours. Evens’s work with watercolour and gouache has matured and is even more assured and complex here. And we see for the first time a more structured narrative, indebted to traditional fairy tales. But make no mistake: this is far from a kids’ book.

  The graphic novel tells the story of Christine, a naive and fragile young girl who is bereaved by the death of her cat. When the charming and enormous Panther, self-proclaimed prince of Pantherland, arises from her bedroom dresser at night to enchant and comfort her, Christine accepts the feline’s friendship without hesitation. But it is clear from the beginning that Panther is up to no good. The shape-shifting trickster can fool the girl but the reader sees through him – and fears for her. The predictability of her victimization by her abuser and her lack of agency somehow do not undermine the narrative tension, which is kept tight by the author’s ability to blend text and images so smoothly that it becomes impossible to conceive of them separately.

  Evens uses transparencies, a rich and vibrant colour palette, clever light schemes, unusual angles, superimposition, distorted/flattened perspective, and colour-coded lettering to inform the reader about the characters, their emotions and intentions, and the many ways they connect, interact, and influence each other. The expressions and movements of Panther go from statue-static with elegant line drawings to leaps and sprints in flowing brushstrokes, his face varying from manipulatively sweet and gentle to menacing and wild. The rooms and architecture function as mood-expressing devices, too, with intricate geometrical patterns interwoven with phantasmagorical apparitions.

  At some point it becomes no longer clear if Panther is an external threat or an allegory of a child spiralling down into the abyss of her own loss and sadness. The sinister disappearance of a teddy bear and the arrival of new and creepier characters only reinforce the atmosphere of madness. Full-page panels at the end of chapters depicting nightmarish images (are they Panther’s? or Christine’s?) offer rhythm to the story and a sense of deepening dread. The conclusion is not reassuring in its ambiguity, and the reader is left midway between wonderment and revulsion.

  In his anti-cinematic approach, with no panel divisions, where each page is visually mesmerizing, Evens succeeds in creating a book that is an art object, ingeniously exploring the flat medium of paper by giving it depth through a delicate layering of images and meanings. Like Panther, he seduces us to the end – even if some of us are a bit tired of the trope of the helpless girl succumbing to the powerful (and in this case supernatural) evil guy.

  Eloisa Aquino is originally from Brazil, where she worked as a journalist and translator. She currently lives and works in Montreal running the micro press B&D Press and making the zine series The Life & Times of Butch Dykes.

• Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-brecht-evens-and-the-complications-of-growing-up/
  Word count: 591

  QUOTED: "Evens has, over several releases, shown himself to be a master at his use of color and cacophony in unison to create his worlds. In Panther he outdoes himself."

  Review: Brecht Evens and the complications of growing up

  05/03/2016 3:00 pm by John Seven 2 Comments
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  panther

  Unfolding like a children’s book gone horribly wrong, Brecht Evens’ Panther begins with the death of Christine’s cat and the appearance what might be an imaginary friend designed to take its place and ease the sadness of the loss. Panther springs out of Christine’s bottom drawer and into her life with a sly charm that becomes slowly more unsettling as the story continues, not unlike the Cat In The Hat, actually.

  At first, there’s an innocence to their exchanges, as with their first meeting when Panther tells Christine about his native Pantherland and it evolves into Panther adjusting his tale according to prompts from Christine, telling her exactly what she wants to hear. It’s obvious that Christine craves control of this fantasy and Panther is only too willing to oblige her.

  panther2As their relationship continues, we learn a little bit more about Christine, the sad circumstances of her family situation, and the larger loss that the death of her cat is a mere marker for. Emotionally adrift in reality, Christine is experimenting with leaving it entirely and letting herself sink into the comfort of a fantasy situation that shields her from the real emotions that childhood has so far allowed her to skim over, but as she becomes a “big girl,” are looming and unavoidable.

  But fantasies are self-created escape systems, and the self is usually a horribly flawed thing. What lurks inside us is as informed by our terrors, our despair, our inability to seize control of any situation, as it is by our hopes, our dreams, our strengths.

  And fantasies that spring forth might be designed to dispel the darkness, but the darkness from within is a part of them as well. That’s what overtakes Christine’s encounter with Panther, as other elements are introduced that awakens unease in Christine, even though it might be too late to do anything about any of that.

  Besides, Panther’s a liar from the beginning, right? He’s actually a leopard, isn’t he? So how can we even trust him?

  Evens has, over several releases, shown himself to be a master at his use of color and cacophony in unison to create his worlds. In Panther he outdoes himself. He exudes wonder and darkness in context of a child, and at times channels the great Ludwing Bemelmans with his stark sweeps of visual poetry mixing intense colors and abstract movement into the storytelling. It’s the perfect filter through which to present a coming of age fable that often strikes way too close too home in the reader’s own experience of what it is like to enter that questionable world beyond our safe childhood rooms — or to let that world come in on its own and change even our most trusted totems of innocence.

• Comicbookgrrrl
  http://www.comicbookgrrrl.com/2011/10/29/comic-review-the-wrong-place-by-brecht-evens/
  Word count: 523

  QUOTED: "The Wrong Place reads like a trip to an immersive and wonderful art gallery, with every painting bleeding in to the next to create an overarching narrative that ensures no matter what your literary or art tastes, you will not put this book down."

  29Oct/11

  When The Wrong Place was published in the US last year, it soon became a darling of the comics press as it had been in the European scene, with praise heaped upon the creator, Brecht Evens. Yet when it was released and re-released here in the UK, as recently as earlier this month, it was once again to a familiar silent reception from the mainstream media. Even the most wonderful of independent comics still inhabit that uncomfortable grey area between literature and art, not fully accepted by either establishment.

  I mention this only as it is such a shame that so many people will not have heard of The Wrong Place, and the acclaim from the comics community was most assuredly well deserved. Evens tells the story of a group of individuals leading separate but interconnected lives, rendered in vivid colour and experimental style. Gary and Robbie, the long term best friends whose lives are polar opposites: Gary always in lonely grey, Robbie in brightest blues and surrounded by adoration.

  Cover art for The Wrong Place by Brecht Evens

  At first glance this title stands out as a bold and unapologetic art-comic; there are no rigid panels to be found, and full pages are given over to wonderfully busy scenes, or page after page of headshots. Time is fluid, roaming around the page and crossing over its past trails as if it were a chronological Penrose staircase; a sex scene is astonishing for its beauty and expressionistic figures. The emotions within the entire tale are palpable: loneliness so intense it hurts; desire for love spilling across the pages of displacement; awkwardness so well rendered as to sting.
  Every small moment is rendered beautifully.Particularly refreshing is the lack of moralising or judgement. Each character lives a very different life, but none are shown to be incorrect, vapid, or immoral. As Evens has said, it's "a book in which people coldly step on each other’s soul all the time, except when they don’t."
  LonelinessThe Wrong Place reads like a trip to an immersive and wonderful art gallery, with every painting bleeding in to the next to create an overarching narrative that ensures no matter what your literary or art tastes, you will not put this book down until you have finished, sated and satisfied. If this sounds like ridiculously high praise then rest assured that it is well deserved: this is a magnificent triumph.

  Evens' earlier work, Night Animals, has been translated for the US market (Evens is Belgian and the comics were originally published in Dutch) but has not yet been published in the UK. I can't wait!

  In the Wrong Place is out now, published by Jonathan Cape, priced £14.99 (Drawn and Quarterly, priced $24.95 in the US)

• Publishers Weekly
  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-77046-073-7
  Word count: 431

  QUOTED: "Peterson's anti-hero nature may frustrate readers searching for a likable protagonist."

  The Making Of
  Brecht Evens. Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-77046-073-7

  The contrast between creating art and building a community, and passion and pretension, is at the center of this beautiful, ink-wash Flemish import. Set in the fictional village of Beerpoele, the story reveals how Peterson, a minorly successful artist from the big city, is brought into a strange, amateur artistic community. Hoping to make their village a cultural center, the artists of Beerpoele are creating an exhibit for a biennial celebration. Peterson, dismayed at the cavalier attitude of the artists, wrangles them into creating a single big project as a team. But Peterson's leadership style soon has the other artists disillusioned with the project (though never with Peterson, whom they adore) and the impermanent nature of art is revealed in all too spectacular a fashion. Evens's abstract art breathes life into the small, quirky community—as well as city night clubs and art classes—and his washes of color are brilliant. The lettering style, using different colors of ink for different characters, helps establish unique voices. The story, however, is crowded with characters who are difficult to like, and Peterson's anti-hero nature may frustrate readers searching for a likable protagonist.

  The Making Of
  Brecht Evens. Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-77046-073-7

  The contrast between creating art and building a community, and passion and pretension, is at the center of this beautiful, ink-wash Flemish import. Set in the fictional village of Beerpoele, the story reveals how Peterson, a minorly successful artist from the big city, is brought into a strange, amateur artistic community. Hoping to make their village a cultural center, the artists of Beerpoele are creating an exhibit for a biennial celebration. Peterson, dismayed at the cavalier attitude of the artists, wrangles them into creating a single big project as a team. But Peterson's leadership style soon has the other artists disillusioned with the project (though never with Peterson, whom they adore) and the impermanent nature of art is revealed in all too spectacular a fashion. Evens's abstract art breathes life into the small, quirky community—as well as city night clubs and art classes—and his washes of color are brilliant. The lettering style, using different colors of ink for different characters, helps establish unique voices. The story, however, is crowded with characters who are difficult to like, and Peterson's anti-hero nature may frustrate readers searching for a likable protagonist. (Sept.).

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/28/making-of-brecht-evens-review
  Word count: 821

  QUOTED: "The real pleasure of The Making Of lies not in its plot, however comical, but in the way it looks, which is remarkable. Evens, who works in watercolour, really is the quirkiest of illustrators."
  "an invigorating tale of discomfort and joy, with artwork that captivates."

  The Making Of by Brecht Evens – review
  The Belgian cartoonist's latest novel is an amusing tale about hubris, but it's the illustrations that really dazzle
  The Making Of by Brecht Evens
  'The quirkiest of illustrators': The Making Of by Brecht Evens.

  Rachel Cooke
  @msrachelcooke

  Monday 28 January 2013 07.00 GMT

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  Brecht Evens, the award-winning Belgian illustrator, wrote his new graphic novel, The Making Of, with the help of a grant from the Flemish Literature Fund – which is quite funny given that his book starts out as a neat little satire on the world of subsidies, festivals and all the other ways in which public money is used to help 21st-century artists survive; I wonder how much the fund's administrators knew about what he was doing when they gave him the cheque. Not that they've any cause to complain. Evens is the finest ambassador for Belgian illustration since Hergé, and his book, so original and so gorgeous-looking, comes with the warm-hearted message that, however silly and pompous this world can sometimes be, in the end, art only ever brings people together.

  Peterson, a moderately successful artist, has been invited to participate in a biennial at a village called Beerpoele. He's quite puffed up about this, telling an old friend that he'll be "creating something in situ" when he gets there. But alas, all is not what it seems. Peterson was the only artist dumb enough – or desperate enough – to have agreed to participate in the festival, and its organiser, Kristof, is not some adoring arts professional, but an enthusiastic amateur aided and abetted by a small crowd of village misfits. Worst of all, he intends to put Peterson up, not in some swanky hotel, but in his mother's garage, which she has generously kitted out with a mattress, a potty and a goldfish bowl. Peterson, however, is not to be put off. Now he's here, he'll create something great: an ironic – and iconic – masterpiece fashioned from papier mache that will tower above Beerpoele, and have the Brussels critics flocking.
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  Needless to say, it all goes a bit wrong – this is a book about hubris, after all – and it's pretty funny watching Peterson's plans crumble about his ears (he fails even successfully to bed his newest groupie, a care home assistant with tomato-coloured hair). But the real pleasure of The Making Of lies not in its plot, however comical, but in the way it looks, which is remarkable. Evens, who works in watercolour, really is the quirkiest of illustrators (at the Angoulême international comics festival, his last book, The Wrong Place, was awarded a prize for "audacity", and it isn't too hard to see why). I love the way he uses colour to signify personality type – Kristof, big and loud, is red; Peterson, vain and just a little sleazy, is a liverish, retro shade of green – and his wild experiments with scale and perspective mean that, for him, pace is never a problem. Turning the pages, you never know what you'll find next: a scene from a children's fairytale, lush and magical; a comic strip, busy and droll; or a nightmare straight out of the lost sketchbook of Edvard Munch.

  The Wrong Place by Brecht Evens - review
  By James Smart

  Tuesday 15 November 2011 09.00 GMT
  First published on Tuesday 15 November 2011 09.00 GMT

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  There's always a party going on somewhere in Belgian cartoonist Evens's gorgeous fourth book, which uses watercolours to wonderful effect. Evens gives us riotous nightclubs, bulging tube trains and a one-night stand of shapes and smudges, but is just as fascinated by an awkward silence as by a good dancefloor. The book follows the relationship between Gary, a man so ostensibly colourless that he moves in shades of grey, and Robbie, a mysterious party animal who proceeds through the city like the Pied Piper, accepting compliments from almost everyone he passes. In his first story, Robbie's absence bleeds the life from Gary's house party; in the second he leaps from a pot plant to ravish shy Naomi; in the third a heart-to-heart turns into a fencing bout. Robbie takes strange routes through the city. Evens adopts similar tactics, painting a scene from behind a chair, or leading the eye in unexpected directions, to follow red hair through a crowd or conversations up a stairwell. The result is an invigorating tale of discomfort and joy, with artwork that captivates.

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