Tillie Walden, comic book author: “Sometimes you have to clear your mind to be able to create”

"That's a lot of books, indeed!" She suppresses a burst of laughter, but she admits it: Tillie Walden is a prolific comic book author. At 29, the American has already published a dozen works, exploring a range of genres from autobiographical narratives to space opera and zombie horror. Less well-known in France than across the Atlantic, she was in Paris at the end of May for the release of Double Crush (Gallimard, 240 pages, 19.90 euros), which concludes her two-part series written by the Canadian singing duo Tegan and Sara Quin. In other news, and not the least important: on June 25, the highly anticipated final installment of her Clementine trilogy (Delcourt, 260 pages, 20.50 euros), a spin-off of The Walking Dead comics, was released in bookstores.

Value doesn't wait for the number of years. As cliché as the adage may be, it finds in Tillie Walden a perfect incarnation. Public and critical success was particularly evident with her fourth album, Spinning (Gallimard, 2017). A wildly elegant autobiographical tale in which she recounts her painful relationship with figure skating at the same time as her transition to adulthood and her coming out as a lesbian. "The writing process was laborious, almost chaotic ," she recalls. "Every day, I forced myself to confront a memory and make a page out of it." The result is a dense album in the form of a literary gesture that earned its young author, 21 years old at the time, an Eisner Award, the equivalent of the Oscars for comics across the Atlantic.

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