On Wednesday 3rd April, Mr Dhumes, our fantastic
PE teacher, was interviewed as Dum the cartoonist by Maximilien Gidon and
Alyette Maréchal. It was really interesting!
Dum draws for “La Galipote”, an Auvergnat alternative newspaper
that has been around for the last 35 years and is sold in more than 700 shops.
It’s a bit like a local Charlie Hebdo…
When he was a child, Dum used to copy from Asterix
comic books. At university, he drew for a rag that he created with friends. He
wanted to share his ideas through his drawings. Cartoons are still his passion.
It is very difficult to earn a living as an illustrator, hence his being a
sports teacher.
Dum likes many things in cartoons like the speed in
the execution of a drawing (a cartoon can be done in an hour) and the fact that
we can express ourselves through cartoons.
The role of the cartoonist is also interesting because
he (or she) can comment the news through drawings (satirical cartoons of
politicians but also of unknown people). Dum explained that the cartoonist is
often in opposition with politicians, however the cartoonist sets himself limits,
consciously or unconsciously because of his education or his culture, and he
has to adapt his drawings to the newspaper that publishes them.
Also, being a cartoonist requires some capacities:
according to Dum, the illustrator has to be able to criticize both right-wing
policies and left-wing policies. It is more interesting for him to draw about
recent events so his cartoons will have more impact on people.
Dum also talked about “les 3 R” : the aim of a cartoon
should be to make people laugh (Rire), react (Réagir) and think (Réfléchir). He
believes that the most important, for a cartoonist, is to make people think. To
achieve this goal, he needs to make people laugh and react. Nonetheless things
that make people laugh are different according to their culture or their
education. Laughter is a common thing but humour is different from one person
to the next.
Finally, the interviewers raised the issue of the
attacks on Charlie Hebdo last January in Paris. These did not have much impact
on the content of Dum’s drawings because he doesn't draw about religion but it
moved him for sure and he felt like drawing even more.
Satirical drawings are a French tradition and Dum
believes that we should have more media education, because it is essential to make
people think about what is going on in the world. Since the terrorist attack,
Dum has given many talks in various schools as a cartoonist.
Dum’s latest project is a little dictionary about
school life; finding readers and a publisher is quite a complicated task…
