It's an old article I just found (2013), but I didn't know about this hommage.
https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20130603/e ... 8622.shtml
It is the first long work by the cartoonist Chema Peral
"Jean Michel Jarre is an amazing artist," he says.
Waiting for Jean Michel (Apa-Apa) is the comic book debut of Chema Peral , a young artist who will be much talked about and who dedicates this first work to the musician Jean Michel Jarre , who stars in a story of "love, dreams, space-time travel and a lot of New Age", with large doses of humor and fantasy .
"To explain the plot of my comic," Chema says, "would reveal a large part of what I tell in those panels, so I'm going to tell you a few things about Waiting for Jean Michel to complement the reading experience for those who want to read it. To give you an idea, it's about two stories that intersect, about two lives ."
"On one hand, there's the story of French musician Jean Michel Jarre in the late 80s and his musical experiments, and on the other hand, the life of Andrea, an Italian girl who has loved music since childhood and finds herself at a somewhat difficult point in her life, one that most of us have experienced or are currently experiencing: being unemployed and not knowing where our lives are headed . These two stories intersect thanks to a common thread: music ."
"I was blown away by Jean-Michel"
"I chose Jean-Michel Jarre because I saw great potential in him , not only as an artist, but also as a character who offered a lot of possibilities when it came to creating a story," Chema confesses. "His name was always on my mind, in my imagination of musicians, but I wasn't familiar with his work. One day I told my friend Teo (an expert in screen printing) that one of my dreams was to record a music video with lots of songs from the '80s, and that I'd like him (Teo) to appear at some point playing the keyboards. His reaction was immediate; he told me that if he had to play a keyboard, it had to be a specific one."
"Then he showed me the video of Jean Michel Jarre's live performance at "La Défense" playing the piece Calypso . In it, Jean Michel was playing a very curious curved keyboard . It was the time when Apa Apa Comics had proposed that I do a comic about a musician, but I wasn't very sure about it. When I saw that live performance, I was blown away by Mr. Jarre."
"I started investigating and discovered an amazing person and artist , for his musical richness, his restlessness and hunger to produce music, to create his own instruments, and for his amazing stage presence. In one of the meetings I had with Toni and Fani from Apa Apa, I floated the idea of making a comic about him, and they thought it was a good idea. I already had a very solid character to draw a comic about," Chema says.
Blah Blah Cafe, the Jean-Michel Jarre forum
