I never thought it would be the major story that I would do. But I didn’t really know much more than that. I just knew I wanted to hang out on the beach, and I wanted to explore this imaginary town. And in issue #2, I started serializing Hicksville, and it was meant to be just a minor back-up story that I was doing for fun, and I didn’t know where I was going. In Pickle, I was doing lots of short stories, and some of them had the same characters, but they were independent stories. I was already using those characters, and connecting them up in all sorts of ways, before I started Hicksville. But Hicksville emerged, it wasn’t there at the beginning.

For a long time, Hicksville was the center of that. But for me, it’s the landscape of my… my dream world. You’ve got characters appearing in different stories, sometimes they include some of your works, like the story of the last fox in Hicksville….ĭylan Horrocks : I think I have always been building an imaginary landscape for myself, and by mapping the landscape, I create the landscape and bring it to life. You have Emil Kópen saying : “comics are similar to a map”, and I’ve got the impression that in Pickle, there was this attempt at mapping something. Xavier Guilbert : There is some kind of metatextual approach in your work. Magic Pen is partly about finding my way back to comics. I think the strange experience I had of working for DC and losing my intimacy with comics for a while means that now, I feel like… like Hicksville was a beautiful dream, and I don’t know if I can still go there. And after Hicksville, I guess I lived in Hicksville for a long time, but I don’t think I’m there now. It was seventeen years now, since it was published. Xavier Guilbert : Because I get the impression that you are still there.ĭylan Horrocks : Well… it’s funny, it’s a long time since I’ve been to Hicksville. Xavier Guilbert : So – how difficult is it to leave Hicksville ?

Hicksville graphic novel