Comic strip explains NI in France

IN A country where comics are taken as seriously as poetry, it had to happen: a comic book to tell the French in the simplest terms what Northern Ireland is all about.

French comic strip artist Lax - real name Christian Lacroix - wanted his fictional account of the west Belfast Doherty family to seem real. And it convinced a jury of eight journalists from France Info radio station, who this week awarded him the Prix de la Bande Dessinee de l'Actualite.

Lax's book, Chiens de Fusil (Gun Dogs), stands a good chance of winning the Alpha award at the Cannes of comic books, next week's Angouleme Festival.

Lax spent two weeks in Northern Ireland, interviewing Catholics and Protestants and taking photographs. He also read books on the Northern conflict and a biography of Michael Collins. "French people have a romantic idea of the IRA," he admitted. "I didn't want to fall into the trap."

In Gun Dogs the father, Eamon, is murdered by B Specials. Elder brother Denis joins the IRA. Denis recounts how he blew up three British soldiers on patrol. "I didn't even hear the explosion ... just wailing and moans, quickly smothered by all this dust that filled the neighbourhood."

Denis says he killed "first of all for me, out of vengeance, out of hatred! Then for the others, to fight injustice, to build a new society in Northern Ireland. To build, to destroy rather ... I am a destroyer... of men, of family ... I create widows and orphans, a negative knight!"

Denis's younger brother Dermot wants to be an artist. "Why fight each other?" he asks a Protestant girlfriend. `We share the same country, we wear the same clothes, like the same music, drink the same beer." Stephen Molloy, a kind Protestant student, defends Dermot when he is harassed by students and teachers at art school.

Stephen espouses the nationalist cause and dies on hunger strike in prison. Dermot is drawn into the IRA but flees Northern Ireland in disgust after the Enniskillen bombing, which he calls "an overdose of cadavers".

"If my book is pro Catholic, I didn't mean it to be," Lax said. "I tried to stay neutral. The Catholics have been oppressed by the crown and England - that's clear. But there have been excesses on both sides. Nobody in Northern Ireland is black or white now, they're all grey. I tried to get across in my book how unavoidable the conflict seems to people who live there.

"Belfast was infinitely sad to me, with its shipyards and shut down factories. I felt that every generation is implicated, whether it wants to be or not."

The artist was struck by the way the war is contained in poor areas of Belfast: "You see a lot of chicanes and barbed wire, but as soon as you go up the hillside it all disappears. You have the impression the war involves just a few neighbourhoods - a war among poor people, who fight because they have time on their hands, because there's no work for them.

"But I'm not a historian or a politician. I'm just a comic strip artist."