Delphine Panique

Delphine Panique is a comic book author whose first graphic novel, Orlando, is freely adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel and was published in 2013 by Editions Misma. It was followed, in 2015, by En Temps de Guerre, which was part of the official selection at the 2016 Angoulême Festival. She further developed her drawing and narrative style in her next works, L’Odyssée du Vice (2016), Le Vol Nocturne (2018) and Les Classiques de Patrique (2019), published by Les Requins Marteaux, Cornélius and Gallimard respectively. Her two most recent books, Un Beau Voyage and Creuser Voguer, have featured in numerous selections and won a number of prizes.

Delphine Panique’s project is to freely adapt Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book: a work that is steeped in the poetry of the everyday, but also contains a sense of great sadness and melancholy in its white spaces, a phenomenon with which Panique, as a comic-book author, is well-acquainted. Her intention goes beyond a simple adaptation, seeking instead to experience and immerse herself in Sei Shônagon’s observations and thoughts. Delphine Panique considers The Pillow Book to be a work on the female condition: a lady at the Japanese court is subject to numerous rules, including social and geographical confinement. This confinement and inactivity make her more alert to her natural surroundings, her feelings but also the passing of time. Such heightened awareness of the world around us could be precisely what we need today, to help us escape from the absurdity and relentlessness of the modern world, with its contempt for humans and nature.

Portrait : @Editions Misma

-1 Bruits_Delphine_Panique_small-clean : Performance festival Fumetti 2023, @delphinepanique
-2 Lidépompier : @delphinepanique
-3 unbeauvoyage_exterieur-34 : extrait de Un beau voyage, Editions Misma, 2023, @delphinepanique
-4 unbeauvoyage_exterieur-34 : extrait de Un Beau Voyage, Editions Misma, 2023, @delphinepanique