Nauti-poulpe
“Very soon, I was delighted to see that they wanted to adapt my novels for the stage, in puppet shows or animated images projected on a screen using the cinematograph, invented in 1895 by the Lumière brothers. And from the 1880s, artists had the idea of presenting my novels through a series of juxtaposed drawings, accompanied by texts, for example in the Epinal images, a kind of literature in prints.
Many years later, with this modern way of telling stories that we would come to call comics, it seems I strongly inspired Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten. In their cycle of Cités Obscures (published by Casterman), they developed it as an extension of my worlds, even making me one of their fictional characters, in L’Enfant penchée, in 1987.
Then, in 2018, the cartoonist François Schuiten and sculptor Pierre Matter invented the hybrid creature you see here, the Nauti-poulpe, which at the end of its journey settled in my fine city of Amiens. And by one of those whims of fate that I would have loved to create and write, the Nauti-poulpe in turn became the character of a fictional work, a comic strip, The Return of Captain Nemo, in which Amiens and I play a central role.”
