William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) is considered one of the greatest English illustrators of the first half of the 20th century. His abundant work, in the public domain since 2019, has never been translated in France. We have adapted one of his masterpieces “How to live in a flat” (original text by KRG Browne) dated 1937 with an unpublished text by Jean-Luc Coudray on the joys of confinement in an apartment, and entrusted the coloring to Isabelle Merlet, one of the finest colorists of the period, and the graphic adaptation to Philippe Poirier, a graphic aesthete and great specialist in the illustrators of the Anglo-Saxon Golden Age (and the initiator of a first collection published by Les Moutons électriques).
The publisher wanted to bring together these three talents, whose facetious spirit blends perfectly with WHR’s English humor and nonsense, and whose book’s theme resonates astonishingly with current events.
Jean-Luc Coudray: writer, scriptwriter of humorous drawings and comic strips, and illustrator of the “Béret et Casquette” strips, was born in Bordeaux in 1960. Jean-Luc Coudray writes short stories, narratives, aphorisms and reflections on degrowth. With a taste for synthesis, he leans towards condensed writing, where humor and poetry meet in shortcuts or unexpected rapprochements, in the form of paradoxes.
Isabelle Merlet: A colorist, she has notably worked on the colors of acclaimed comic book albums such as Blutch’s “Lune l’envers” and Taiyo Matsumoto’s “Les Chats du Louvre”.
