Pendant que le loup n’y est pas

  • Valentine Gallardo (France)
  • Mathilde Van Gheluwe (Belgium)
  • Categories
  • Autobio
  • /
  • Feminism

Belgium, 1990s.
Valentine Gallardo and Mathilde Van Gheluwe are growing up. They have a normal childhood on the whole, balancing carefreeness and worries, dreams and nightmares, innocence and cruelty.
But with just a sentence or a gesture, the grown-up world invites itself in their own world, especially when the threat started to show itself: “There are children who disappear”. During this period, a child molester and murderer, a tangible threat, terrified Belgium and the surrounding area.
The two authors explore what it meant to grow up in this context. Step by step, anxiety and fear inexorably expand themselves, and shaped their personality. The sweetness of the everyday life and then the anxious atmosphere are rightfully and acutely transcribed.
The book was created “four-handedly”, keeping a beautiful graphic unity while preserving each author’s own graphic style. Its great nuanced and rounded black and white color scheme marvellously represents the trouble of leaving childhood.

“Although never explicitly named, the infamous Belgian serial killer, rapist, and child molester Marc Dutroux hovers like a ghost over this tale, creeping into the playground and slinking into scary stories whispered by night. […] The two female creators show a real gift for observation when it comes to capturing the details of faces and sneaky childish bickering. Their black and white expressionist art comes alive in dreamlike shadows that weigh on the little girls’ uncertainty and fears.”
Clémentine Gallot, Libération

176 pages

Black and white

19.50 x 25.50 cm

Softcover with flaps

ISBN : 978-2-88923-083-9

19.00 €