Life of Guangzhou - Twin Literature Creators from Belgium

They are a couple of twin brothers with minor distinctions in appearance – one with glasses and the other without. These Belgian brothers are very tall, when I told them they are very well known in the comic circle, they punned that they are really "big men."

Our interview was in a café on the peaceful Shamian Island. Like most European gentlemen, they consciously took drinks from the counter for the ladies. We began by looking at a photo they shot in front of a table in Rogues, Southern France, where they spent a period living and creating.

The photo shot in Rogues (L-Denis, R-Olivier)

Denis Deprez is Olivier Deprez's elder brother. He speaks fluent English, and explained that their job title is not illustrators but something like story boarders, a very unfamiliar career to me and most Chinese. Their job is similar to planning each scene of a movie with artwork - but their way is slightly different – Denis uses water color and Oliver carves wood for printmaking.

Olivier Deprez graduated from Saint-Luc à Bruxelles, an art school known for the quality of its comic strip section. He later quickly established a publishing house Frémok (first known as Fréon) with a group of cartoonist friends.

From the Deprez brothers' talk, I learned that they have published a lot of adaptations of the literature or celebrity biographies. "We are inspired by literature. It is the best way to tell stories," the brothers said.

Olivier draws a picture onto a wooded plate (lifeofguangzhou.com)

In 2003 Olivier published an adaptation in a wood engraving of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle. The same year he also published a set of engravings to accompany a cycle of poems of Jan Baetens with Maisonneuve & Larose, Construction d'une ligne TGV.

"I have just finished a program called "Blackbookblack", published in February 2008. Now I am working with a touring travelogue which inspired a possible future book, and I have worked with Adolpho Avril, a mentally ill patient, on a long story in wood engraving, the first part of which is due to be published in a collective work on October 2008 by the CEC "La Hesse" and Frémok.

What about his elder brother Denis?

"Frankenstein was my first published comic. And later in 2004, I created the adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello and in 2005 Les Champs d'Honneur."

In 2007, he published the watercolor comic Moby Dick, the novel by Herman Melville. The same year, he was invited by the musician Bruno Letort and created a comic of Japanese writer Murakami's stories, and presented it on the screen of Bruno's feature concert.

Denis Deprez's next target is Holland artist Rembrandt's biography. Currently he is working on the creation of a comic strip scenario about the life and work of the Japanese architect Tadao Andô.

"Can the readers buy your works in China?" I asked. "No, they can only buy them on Amazon (an e-commerce website)." Although Denis visits Guangzhou frequently to meet his Chinese fiancée, it seems that the link with China's readers is still a long way off.

(By Jessie Hwang, Alan Devey)