We must therefore call him Jul from now on, without “e” or “s” at the end of his first name. It doesn’t matter that this one is the pseudonym of another comic strip author – Julien Berjeaut, alias Jul, the creator of Flint and the City – or a successful Marseille rapper – Julien Mari, whose nickname is pronounced “Djoul”. What is important is not to remind him of his original feminine first name, with the identical root – his deadname, in trans terminology. “Pronouncing it can be perceived as psychological violence and cause a state of shock which makes any conversation difficult,” warns Jul Maroh from the outset, that morning, in his house in the historic center of Angoulême which he is preparing to leave to move to Paris. Jul is also the name of a pagan Norse deity, it says. A mixture of the profane and the sacred. We couldn’t find better.
If there is one subject with which Jul Maroh does not compromise, it is that of his surname. Did he not ask and obtain from the publishing house Glénat to have his new identity printed on the reissues of his flagship album, Blue is a warm colour, the chronicle of the passionate loves of two young women, published in 2010? At the same time, didn’t he launch an action against Wikipedia so that the first name given to him by his parents could be erased from his file? The matter is not won. “Most Wikipedians, he emphasizes, are 40- or 50-year-old straight, educated white guys who write from their experiences of the world. » A ” world “ from which he often feels excluded.
Failing to delete a word, will the contributors to the online encyclopedia have to add others to evoke the scope of his new album? If Blue is a warm colour, adapted for the cinema by Abdellatif Kechiche under the title The Life of Adele (Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013), has become a bestseller in lesbian literature (130,000 copies sold, fifteen translations), Hack the skin could be a landmark in the history of the representation of transidentity. Co-written with science fiction novelist Sabrina Calvo, herself a trans woman, the work follows the steps of a loving trio throughout a night marked by terror.
An echo of the increase in homophobic and transphobic acts
The action takes place in Lyon, the far right has just come to power, attacks are targeting minorities – the queer community, on the front line. Between Rhône and Saône, Molly, Trin and Axel went looking for a “third river” legendary, metaphor of a ” other “ romantic path which would be neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality. The first is a trans woman, the second a black poet of indeterminate gender, the last a man in the process of deconstruction despite his masculinist overtones. Who would have imagined that a comic book house with a catalog as “classic” as that of Le Lombard editions (Thorgal, Jonathan, Yakari, L’Elève Ducobu…) could one day open up to subjects such as polyamory or anti-LGBT oppression?
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