Comic Art Museum - Brussels

The teacher is Antonio Cossu, who in turn is a former student of Eddy Paepe at the Academy of Saint-Gilles and of Claude Renard at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels. He is also a Comic Strip author who is continually seeking a new, personal tone, and for 20 years has headed the Comic Strip Art section of the Fine Arts Academy in Tournai, a responsibility long shared with Thierry Umbreit.

As for his students, some of whom have already become confirmed comic strip authors, they benefit from an approach that emphasizes the development of their personality, which explains the wide variety of graphic proposals in this collective volume that we are convinced will become a reference in the history of the 9th art.

JC de la Royère, Belgian Comic Strip Center

Envie 2 Fraises

The comic strip art workshop at the Fine Arts Academy of Tournai is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year – so, ten years after publishing its first collective album, it is now producing a second Envie de Fraises*.

The first volume contains complete stories done by young former workshop participants, graduates and a few students at that time. Ten years later, almost all of these young people have become confirmed artists. They continue to produce ingenious, personal work, blending substance and image in stories that show – to anyone who needs a demonstration - that there is still much to be explored in the world of narration.

The intimate relation between the text and the image attempts to span an infinite spectrum of emotion and to share it with the reader. Whether the story unfolds ­into pleasure for a broad audience, enlarges the field of independent publishing or stretches experimental frontiers, the emotion it creates attests to the relation that the author maintains with his/her place and time.

This interaction is what structures and motivates our approach as artists-teachers. We don't work through examples; we don't emphasize any particular trend. The only prerequisite for publishing these workshop images is their relevance for narration, and their intention of maturing a creative dialogue that gives form to deep-seated desires and their fulfilment, whatever the genre or the theme.

Envie 2 Fraises includes stories written by former participants such as Vanyda , François Duprat, David Bolvin, Toshy, Hyuna Kang, Amaury Bouillez, Ancestral Z, Le Cheval de quatre... plus a few students from the section of Comic Strip Art, ... a non-exhaustive list of course.

We hope that, even more than 10 years ago, this new collection of Envie de Fraises will be a rallying ground for the most original narrative trends and so contribute to broadening our field of expression.

Antonio Cossu