Meet six Parisian illustration-lovers and publishers of Collection Revue

What could be better than six cool pals getting together to make a whopper of a comic book? Meet Collection Revue, a French sextet formed in 2010 and made up of Sammy Stein, Vanessa Dziuba, Marine Le Saout, Antoine Stevenot, Jean-Philippe Bretin and Julien Kedryna. For a year they spent their time and money putting on a bunch of small shows in Paris, exhibiting the work of cartoonists, visual and graphic artists and illustrators to what I can only imagine is a very cool and good-looking crowd. They now channel their collective obsession into very, very appealing publications.

“The thing is, each one of us draws and buys a lot of books and zines,” Julien told me. “The work of a lot of artists we like only exists thanks to self-publishing, and we wanted to learn more about them. We wanted to hear them speak, read their interviews…basically more than seeing their drawings and images or read theoretical writings about them. We’re interested by all types of visual artists: designers, graphic designers, cartoonists, contemporary artists or outsiders. We conceived the book as a meeting space between famous artists and beginners.”

For people who have done so much, for so many small-time artists and cartoonists, they’re pretty humble. “We are not art critics, we didn’t want to write theoretical texts: making interviews felt more natural to us and gave us the chance to meet artists we love. Moreover, we felt it was important to give artists the opportunity to express themselves. For all these reasons, the revue had to get an international dimension, that’s why Collection is bilingual (French and English). Another important point was to control every aspect of Collection, graphic design included. After three quite similar issues, the fourth one is completely different. We decided to separate the texts from the pictures and the design gradually got more radical.”

Wanna get your paws on a copy? Head over to their site and pick up a copy of the truly wonderful issue #4.