23 | Ceres Magazine | Fall 2016
1976, and written by two of the original writers for Saturday Night Live, Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts, and satirist Deanne Stillman, and comics artist Aline Kaminsky. Dominique loved my comics, and thought they would be appropriate for Charlie Hebdo, one in particular, The String Gatherer, about a homeless woman. Those four pages had already appeared in underground comix and in High Times, but they were published in Charlie Hebdo, too.
That’s how I met Georges Wolinski. So sad he was killed in that January 2015 terrorist attack. He was such a lovely man, very encouraging. He really
wanted to work with American cartoonists. There was a trade-off going on, then, and it was so exciting. I mean we were learning from them and they were learning from us.
I also met Jacques Tardi, who had a very wonderful series of books called The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.
Ceres: French director, Luc Besson, recently made of movie based on the comic.
Terre: Oh really, I’d love to see it. Adèle Blanc-Sec was a Victorian detective at the turn-of-the-century
in Paris, and it's all done in beautiful Art Nouveau genre drawings. From the Eiffel Tower to the
pyramids of Egypt, it was beautifully drawn, and I fell in love with the art. Jacques and I even traded artwork because I had told him, when I saw the Adèle Blanc-Sec character, that she was a typical French femme fatale. He thought it was very funny that I had called her that, and he drew Adèle Blanc-Sec in her Victorian setting saying, “I'm a typical French femme fatale, do you know what I mean?”
and he gave it to me in exchange of one of my Effluvium comics page. He liked my Effluvium comics, which had been published in
underground comix, High Times magazine, and in L'Écho des savanes.
I would love to reconnect with some of the cartoonists that I met in France. I've been to Paris since but I’m more involved in filmmaking now. I've actually been invited to the French Women's Film Festival in Angouleme, held every year, since I’ve made some award-winning short films, but I'll wait as I’m working on shooting a feature called Horreur
"I would love to reconnect with some of the cartoonists that I met in France"
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec's character, Adèle Blanc-Sec, drawn by Jacques Tardi for Terre Richards. Private collection. Photo: Lands of Void with the permission from Terre Richards.