Like a sad Lana Del Rey song, Louise Laborie’s comics illustrate a quiet, neon Americana

Paris-based comic book author Louise Laborie’s illustrated worlds ooze with quiet sadness. The creator of the graphic novels Rock‘n’roll Suicide and Morgane Fox is an expert in adapting a familiar, cozy melancholic Americana through neon light spilling out onto streets and headlights twinkling like firebugs on a vast, dark highway. It’s all down to the deftness of watercolour, charcoal and pencil mark making – watercolour paint in particular, which is as thin as light itself, suits the ephemerality of Louise’s major muse: transience. “I am fascinated by the melancholy and the loneliness of transit hubs and peri-urban spaces: car parks, industrial estates, motorways, stations, airports, suburbs and so on. My characters are often alone in these monotonous spaces,” says Louise. “They are here and elsewhere at the same time, lost in their thoughts.”

Inspired by a road trip she did along the Blues Highway from Chicago to New Orleans, Louise’s purgatorial stories don’t just match our inner worlds. They are an homage to a 100 years of art about loneliness and displacement in America, from John Steinbeck and Edward Hopper to David Lynch and Lynda Barry – it’s easy to see the comparisons. Due to films like The Brown Bunny, Paris, Texas and Punch-Drunk Love, the swooning saxophones, weepy slide guitars and low croons float right off the page as familiar imagery joins a cultural canon, one that is endlessly relatable and beautiful. “I found this feeling of disillusionment in the US. I knew this country through images I’ve seen over and over again – images from Hollywood films, the famous American dream... images so carefully crafted to stir up desire that it can only be disappointing when you step out from behind the screen,” says Louise. “It is a recurring theme in my comics and images: the feeling of not belonging, the dissonance one can feel when reality does not truly match our inner world, our aspirations or our fantasies.”