FRENCHMAN ANGELO DI MARCO BELIEVES IN MORAL ABSOLUTES

INTERVIEW BY MATHIEU BERENHOLC, TRANSLATED BY PAULINE EIFERMAN

Who Killed the Lottery Winner?

MORE DRAWINGS BY ANGELO DI MARCO 1 | 2 | 3 | >

Angelo di Marco takes random human-interest stories and turns them into horrorific masterpieces of draftsmanship. French people are crazy about his work. His drawings have been in pretty much every newspaper over there during the past five decades, as well as on billboards and in countless magazines. He’s been lovingly illustrating murders, muggings, shootings, and other good stuff since his late teens. The secret? “It’s all about capturing the instant before the fatal blow,” he says. “No blood, just sheer intense fear and horror.”

Vice: How old were you when you started working as an artist?

Angelo di Marco: When I was 23, I was commissioned to illustrate a monthly short story in the magazine La Vie Parisienne, which still exists today. And after five or six months, one day I brought in my drawings as usual and the editor in chief told me: “I’ve got good news for you!” So I was like, “Am I getting a raise?” And he said: “No, we never give out raises, but this could be even better for you. The newspaper Radar wants to give you a job.” That’s when the good times started. Radar was a broadsheet with a circulation of 1 million at that time. I was happy and excited to see how it would turn out.

And how did it go?

They started by testing me to see how I drew movement. I also did a weekly comic strip. I worked on the section called Inouïe [Incredible], where they put crazy accidents and stuff. For example, they had the story of a woman who fell from a building and landed in a firefighter’s arms.

Were the stories always true?

Yes. Another one was about the theft of a bus. This guy was waiting in the depot and when the driver left the bus, he got on and started driving away. The driver ran toward it and got back up on the bus using the ladder for the bags and he started yelling, “Thief! Thief!” So I drew the picture from the back of the bus, as if you were looking out the second window and you saw the guy yelling.

Do you focus more on the victims?

It depends. If I think the victim is the interesting person, I place myself in an angle that faces him or her. For example, if the person is attacked from behind and strangled, then I draw the face of the victim. And if we don’t know the killer’s face yet, then I draw it at an angle so we can see his hands on the victim’s neck. I recently drew something like that. It was a woman who won the lottery. She had been divorced just before winning a fortune, and then she’d been killed, strangled from behind. I drew a bit of the guy’s face—one of his eyes and his forehead. The cops had actually suspected the ex-husband for a while, but they didn’t have any proof so they let him go.

Did they ever find the killer?

No, he’s still walking.

You draw a lot of horrible scenes, but they never have blood in them. There’s fear, but no gore…

I always try to draw the suspense. I want to draw the instant of shooting, robbing, or stabbing, before the blood comes out. The intensity of the victim is much stronger than the pain itself. Pain is just a grimace. When it hurts, you forget everything around you. But here, the victim knows exactly what’s happening to him and that it’s horrible. And it’s also much more interesting for the attacker. He’s in a complete phase of insanity, maybe in a jealous rage, whatever. You can see in his face that he has the intention of killing.

Do your drawings help you understand humanity?

That might be pushing it a bit, but yeah, I do have my views on mankind. There’s a barbarian side that you can see throughout history. Animals don’t have a conscience. They can commit horrible crimes without knowing it. They kill to eat, while men use this notion of conscience in the wrong way.

So what happens in the mind of a killer?

In my modest opinion, a strange process takes place. Wait, you’re trying to make me talk about psychology here, aren’t you? That’s not my job! But I guess you’re right to talk about it, because there are so many cases like that, where you want to know what exactly made a person commit a crime.

Have any of the stories that you’ve illustrated haunted you?

No, I actually free myself from all of that without really realizing it. Once I finish my drawing, even if it has a dark side to it, I go and deliver it and that’s that. I stop thinking about it. But some people must get scarred by the things they see. It can mark their lives and even their daily routine. Maybe it saddens them, or it gives them a gloomy or a withdrawn side. But not me. I’m pretty much free from all of this.

How?

Because I don’t think about it. I don’t tell myself that I have to forget everything or else I’ll go crazy.

Maybe that’s why there’s such a distance in your drawings…

Maybe, or maybe this distance comes from the fact that I completely start over every time I begin a new drawing. I think of what happened, I put myself in the characters’ shoes, and then I put them into place in the way I imagine the situation. I have to show the drama through the faces, the gestures, the behavior…

And once I’m done, I move on to the next character using the same process, probably with less pity if it’s the attacker. I feel a lot of hate toward someone who kills another. Whatever the situation, no one is allowed to take someone else’s life. It’s completely forbidden. It’s not right to kill, whatever the reason, you know. You can alienate the person, stop seeing them, do whatever you want, but you cannot at any point take his life. Wow, sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away…

Yeah, you are. But I think we can both agree that murder is bad. Thanks!

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