The history of the manga veil, whose English title means “sail”, is due to little. From what we can see, it could be as well in Moscow as in Paris; Take place in the 1930s or 1940s, or even nowadays, but without certainty. The names of the heroes – Emma and Aleksander – is not important, mentioned without more. “They did not start at the start,” said her Japanese author, Kotteri!, Invited to Japan Expo in July. The series, the fourth volume of which was published by Noeve Grafx editions did not even have a title either, at the start.
Nothing is too important in the vaporous veil, with the exception of the relationship between the two characters. He, a police officer, one day meets a young woman in the street and, throughout the conversation, offers him a job as a standardist in his police station. Mystery and not the least, the heroine keeps her eyelids constantly closed under her long eyelashes. The author also gives free rein to the reader’s imagination on the reasons. No sooner will he know according to a dialogue than she “has never seen anyone”.
“I find it just beautiful”, says Kotteri! From this characteristic which gives its heroine a detached, haughty air, and offers even more intimacy to the slow rapprochement of this duo. “I like it when they are converse,” explains the mangaka, who does not consider her comic strip as a romance and structured all her narration around the discussion. Everyone has an opinion on the nature of this relationship, a “slice of life” flirting with the worldly, from which tenderness and manifest proximity emerges. “I do not want to define their relationship, I do not want to put them in a box,” defends the mangaka, which started in self -taught in Japanese amateur comics (dojinshi), was spotted at 17 by the publishing house Shueisha, and persevered ten years before making it his job. “Imagine that there is an invisible line, a veil between her and him. They play by getting closer and moving away from it. It is very subtle.”
We savor the delicacy and the rhythm of the dialogues – sometimes teasing, sometimes affectionate – which often stands acute on sofas, and between two volutes of smoke. The fact remains that it is his breathtaking color drawing (while the manga is generally in black and white) which distinguishes the work of Kotteri !.
it is also a visual imagination that came first in mind: slender silhouettes, graciles, in beautiful winter clothes, all irrigated By the line of the Franco-Italian painter René Gruau (1909-2004) who particularly officiated in the fashion drawing and whose style served Dior as the communication of the lido.