Into the psychoverse: Yanick Paquette talks The Incal and euro influences

Whether you’re a Wonder Woman fan, a Swamp Thing follower, or a rare but loving devotee of Batman Incorporated, Yanick Paquette is inevitably someone whose art you’ve come across and – even more inevitably – utterly been in awe of.

With a career reaching back to humble beginning in 1994, Paquette’s style and gift for world building has seen a reach far beyond any Gotham or Themyscira, where he now finds himself in the deeply psychedelic world of Jodowrowky’s The Incal, and well beyond into new prospects. Fortunately, Popverse was able to sit down with Paquette during the delightful Fan Expo San Francisco, where Paquette offered insight into his split experience between American and European comics.

Popverse: Yanick, talk to me about where you're headed, because up until now you've been working on a lot of American IP; a lot of Wonder Woman and Swamp Thing and things like that. So what's it like doing something like, say, The Incal?

Yanick Paquette: Yeah. Well, Incal is also an IP, it's just for the European market, so in a way it's not like doing creator-owned, it's just a different thing. In my case, because I'm French-Canadian, I've been exposed to the European market — the French and the Belgium stuff  — way before American comics. But when I started doing comics in the second half of the '90s, the American comic was so much more accessible because it was about the crash, but it was still getting absolutely crazy numbers. So when I officially decided I want to do this for a career, I looked at both markets as an option. In Quebec there's just no market…or at least at that time there wasn’t. Now there is some independent stuff — and they do some interesting things —  but it's still a super small market. But at the time, Europe felt like maybe too demanding. They needed full fledged, complete artists. I was just a kid! I was still learning how to draw. The American market was in such a boom that they would hire anybody, kids or not, barely knowing how to draw, which is perfect for me. [laughs] That was me. So I ended up doing comics for the US, but I could has just as easily ended up in Europe in those first years.

So then what's your relationship like with Euro comics against something like you now-relationship with the American market?

Well the way I've learned comics is a bit like a concert pianist in that you have to be super proficient at sight reading anything. So you got a month, you get these crazy scenes to draw, and you need to be able to know your enemy so well in drawing horses and just knowing your skill so well that you can draw it everywhere and fast