#Pierre La Police But what the hell is La Police doing ? An esoteric cartoonist, a poet, a visionary and an animal lover, Pierre La Police anonymously shines forth on the French-speaking cultural landscape. Every interstellar tourist has to consult his works, which represent an inestimable source of information on the inhabitants of this planet.

How does one define your work ?
I'm actually here to promote my work. There's no particular news about it at the moment; there are just about 15 strip cartoons still available in bookshops. I also worked for the press and for TV broadcasts for a few years and organized about 20 exhibitions in various places. At the moment, my work consists in sorting out sea urchins for the needs of a cloak and dagger film.

Do you work according to specific plans or do you rely on your intuition ?
The way I set to work is different each time. I often accumulate elements that I classify according to a personal logic. I have piles of pictures with crabs, boxes filled up with magazines specialized in the study of charcoal. Sometimes all that gets mixed up, and when looking at this chaos, I manage to extract stories from it. Just in the same way you would remove sausages from a barbecue. It often occurred that things I had imagined eventually happened in real life. That's not really surprising, it happens to everyone. For instance I had foreshadowed the mad cow disease phenomenon in my series entitled La Balançoire de Plasma (The Plasma Seesaw). It is some kind of pharmaceutical western in which cannibalistic super heroes - but they are actually seaweed - are fighting against an infectious species of potato flour coming from the moon.

To what extent did surrealism influence your work ?
It occured that I brought some drawings I made in my dreams back into the real world. But never made it a guiding line for my work. Surrealism is the artistic expression of something that exists anyway and that is part of each of us. I wasn't particularly interested in it. I think a walnut is more surrealistic than I am.

What are your other influences (writers, science fiction, music, cinema…) ?
A tuna tin, gunshots, dog clothes, certain types of dust bags, the phenomenon of steam, microwaves…

How do you understand your success and how do you react to it ?
I'm not aware of it. It's always encouraging to hear people say they greatly enjoyed reading your stuff. But I'm not really enjoying my success, and maybe I'm doing a damn stupid thing here. People who know my work don't know my face. When asked what I'm doing as a job, I say I fold leaflets or else that I that I go carting. Some of my admirers who saw me at a conference later asserted that they had seen my face appearing on breakfast cereal boxes.

What are your projects in the short or in the long run ?
I'll start shooting a film in the next few weeks. It will be entitled A Monster Ate My Tax Form!, and it's a comedy for the Iranian television.