A young aristocrat frees himself from the expectations of his community by bodybuilding. With this catchy argument, the two authors created a webtoon – a mobile comic strip – with phenomenal success. Before adapting it for paper.
by Pauline Croquet
Long before the first volume went out in bookstores on January 19, Colossal had conquered a solid community of fans. And for good reason: this series was first born on an online webtoon platform, a vertical comic strip format on smartphone from South Korea, which has, in recent years, appetite the appetite of traditional publishers. The sixty chapters, published on the Internet each week between December 2020 and February 2022, has accumulated 6 million views. Faced with this success, many houses have been on the ranks to offer a paper version. It is Jungle that the two French authors, Diane Truc et Rutile (two pseudonyms), chose.
“Work a discourse on bodies, strength, femininity”
Intended for adolescents and young adults, the series tells the story of Jade, a young corseted aristocrat in his social environment and passionate about bodybuilding. The idea arose in the head of Diane Truc, 29, the designer, who grew up in the Paris region in a family of bikers. “I really wanted to talk about bodybuilding because I had just started there, in the process of wrestling, she tells the” world of books “. It is also a perfect subject to work on a speech on Body, strength, femininity. I gave Jade the physical power that I wanted to reach. “
In the webtoon, that does not forgive: you have to grab the reader from the first chapter, even the introduction, otherwise it abandons. “So I wondered what could contrast the most with the world of muscu, and the idea of the great aristocracy then came,” said Diane Truc. She potassers of Pinçon-Charlot books, devours the comics of Florence Dupré La Tour to give body to an endogamous universe of rallies, worldlyities and appearances.
2D animator after a visit to two reference schools -Les Gobelins and Georges -Méliès -, Diane Truc claims the influence of Gotlib (1934-2016), discovered in the paternal collection, and Hiromu Arakawa, Author of the manga Fullmetal Alchemist published in France by Kurokawa since 2005. After an unsuccessful collaboration with a studio in which she intended colossal, she participated in 2020 in a webtoon platform competition, owned by Naver, a South Korean giant that begins to S ‘ implant in France.
Winner in the humor category, Diane Truc then embeds the 37 -year -old rutile screenwriter to entrust the script to her, the weekly charge on the drawing side being considerable. They build the intrigue and the characters together. Which is not to displease Rutile, as enthusiastic by René Goscinny (1926-1977) as by Alexandre Dumas or the mangaka Yoshihiro Togashi. For her, “The WebToon is the heir to the novel-fireworm”. It allows, she says, to reconnect with popular culture: “BD is gentrified, we forget that its beginnings are humble too.”
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