Conversation with Raphaëlle Macaron

She spills her guts – onto the drawing board

Text: Gilles Khoury. Illustrations: Raphaëlle Macaron.

Illustration commissioned  by L’Orient Littéraire following the Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020. Digital illustration, 2020.

You could almost say that Raphaëlle Macaron is the reflection of the characters that burst from the panels of her comic books: intense, funny, acerbic, extreme, and highly sensitive. In just a few years, she has become a significant figure and, more than that, a model for young illustrators and comic-book authors both in Lebanon and the wider Middle East. A member of the Samandal group since 2014, she chats with us about her professional journey, her ties to Lebanon, her relationship with music, her inspirations, and the landscape of the Lebanese comic-book scene, of which she is incontestably one of the most noteworthy figures.

GILLES When was your first encounter with illustration?

RAPHAËLLE It was all the times that my aunt, Maya Eid, an incredible multidisciplinary artist, would look after my sister and me. Throughout our childhood, she introduced us to working with our hands in every sense. Her teaching style was quite creative. She was the one, for example, who first got me to draw and pushed me to express myself in ways that were not simply figurative. There was a lot of abstraction in what I was drawing back then, because my aunt would give us sponges, or makes us draw with our hands, which was very physical and dynamic. That opened up a lot of possibilities in my head, I think.

Illustration for Socialter magazine special issue called “Le Réveil des imaginaires” (“The awakening of imaginations”), with Alain Damasio as editor-in-chief. Art direction by Kiblind. Digital illustration, 2020.

G What was the first pictorial work that evoked something in you?

R Music was the first thing that opened the door to graphic art. Very early I developed an interest in music and started collecting albums. I can remember all the time that I would spend looking at album covers. The typefaces, the colours, and the artwork all fascinated me. It all became a kind of unconscious well of influence. One in particular comes to mind, which my grandfather gave me for Christmas when I was nine: the album One by The Beatles. The “1,” big and yellow against a red background, the composition, the colours – it made a deep influence on me. The album was crucial in providing a doorway from music to illustration. Even today, I still design a good number of concert posters and collaborate with the group Arab Acid for Climats, their illustrated concerts. I draw in real time, inspired by the music. In addition, my mother read a lot of Belgian comic books, which my sister and I inherited. Those were foundational because they opened my eyes to the notion of telling a story in pictures and…