French illustrator Damien Filliatre's “trashy and cynical” universe

French illustrator Damien Filliatre works in Barcelona under the moniker Estocafich creating cartoons and running a small French publishing house Misma with his twin brother. We caught up with Damien, who told us about his “trashy and cynical” universe.

What, or who, inspires you?

In comics, I love the work of Gunnar Lundkvist, Matti Hagelberg, Amanda Vähämäki or Roope Eronen — all Nordics… I don’t know if it’s a causality. Maybe I recognise myself a little in their melancholy and their stylised drawings. The Canadian Julie Doucet is also a good inspiration.

In France, for me, the best cartoonists are Anouk Ricard and Antoine Marchalot. They make me laugh alone reading their books in my bed. And of course I’m the number one fan of my twin brother, El don Guillermo. He has so much facility to create stories and a perfect sense of dialogues. I’m not as good as him with text. I think I’m more a graphic cartoonist. And if you don’t know the personal work of Anne Simon, you have to read the books we published with MISMA: a rich saga with a lot of pop references. But the best discovery of these last years has been the Australian Simon Hanselmann with his series Megg, Mogg & Owl.

Tell us about one of your favourite recent pieces of work.

One of my last favourite works is some pages of comics I did for Dopututto Max magazine. It’s a clear tribute to the twin brothers Derrick from the manga Captain Tsubasa . As a child, I loved to watch this cartoon on TV and I also founded Misma with my twin brother, so I wanted to take this characters out from the cartoon and make a sort of spin-off in comics. I imagined them really stupid and nasty, soccers like Beavis and Butthead! For me and my brother, the twin topic is really important and we used to draw stories of twins mixing our styles and writing the different visions and experiences of each characters.

Who have you worked with lately?

I’ve been working with L’Articho, a really cool collective founded by two really great illustrators: Yassine and Chamo. They always invite me to participate in crazy graphic projects. One of the last was a triangular book, so every artist had to play with the shape and the format. They are always searching for new talents and new crazy experiences. So working with them it’s always a good occasion to stretch your limits. I love that!

As for illustration, I love the naïve work of John Broadley, the paper cut illustrations of the French illustrator Candice Hayat, Seymour Chwast (a classic!), J. Otto Seibold and the psychedelic work of Japanese illustrator Wakana Yamazaki. We fell in love with her psychedelic drawings and I had the luck to meet her in Tokyo last year. It’s funny to find a non-conforming Japanese girl inspired by Guy Peellaert and the European comics of the ’70s.
 

Any exciting projects coming up in the next month or so you want to tell us about?

I have to work on my big anthology, which is being released in 2017, The Fufurious. This is really my personal work and universe, a sort of Goldilocks and The Three Bears, but trashy and cynical.