François Schuiten
"The Theory of the Grain of Sand"
from the series Cities of the Fantastic
Colored pencil, black ink, Indian ink, acrylic on paper
1992–2009
King Baudouin Foundation, Brussels
© Peeters-Schulten-Casterman, Ph. de Formanoir
The rights-restricted image is purposely blurred.
S13E1.
Jesper Kyd
I chose this image from François Schuiten's series Cities of the Fantastic, which has been recently brought to English under the Obscure Cities name. What I see is an impossible situation. There's no way your house is going to be in the water like that, and he's just sitting there completely calm, like everything is fine. Of course it speaks about the environmental damage that we've been doing to Earth and the way the water rise is becoming a problem here in the US and the world, of course. But it also is very much Schuiten's style of mixing two things together that don't really go together. Basically, in my head, the inventors of the comic books Tintin and Asterix and Smurfs invented all of that stuff that took years to break through in America. There's so many risks being taken in comic book art. It doesn't try to conform to anything. I find it very liberating to read certain comic books. They're just so much out of the box, which is what I try to do with my music as well. It inspires me to push things harder and to keep reminding myself that we haven't reached a place where, oh, everything has been done. So that's what I get out of his artwork. I love when he combines two impossible situations together and it makes you think.