Mathieu Sabin has turned Daniel Benac’s best-selling novel, Eye of the Wolf, into a comic book.

sWhen Nathan Editions picked up the phone and suggested that Mathieu Sabin adapt The Eye of the Wolf, Daniel Benach’s best-selling 1984 novel that has sold two million copies, the designer jumped at the chance. Finally, “I would be able to work on a story whose author was still alive. I had already edited the stories, but the authors were no longer there.”

sWhen Nathan Editions picked up the phone and suggested that Mathieu Sabin adapt The Eye of the Wolf, Daniel Benach’s best-selling 1984 novel that has sold two million copies, the designer jumped at the chance. Finally, “I would be able to work on a story whose author was still alive. I had already edited the stories, but the authors were no longer there.”

At forty-nine years old, Matthew Sabin has had time to smear a few lines in his autobiography. He always alternated between children’s albums and those for adults, and also tried to tell behind-the-scenes stories: that of the film “Ginsburg (Heroic Life)” by Joan Safar, of the newspaper “Liberation”, about the 2012 presidential campaign, the 2015 Elysee, or Filming a documentary in Azerbaijan with Gérard Depardieu.

Secret agent and fugitive

On October 6, “Edgar” will be available in bookstores. Who is Edgar? Seventy-year-old Portuguese with thousands of lives, fierce Marxist, resistance fighter under the Salazar dictatorship, secret agent, fugitive, direct descendant of the Duke of Wellington… Fortunately, Edgar is also Mathieu Sabine’s father-in-law.

Then comes Sunday, October 8th. At two o’clock in the afternoon, during the screening of Lire en Pocket at Gradignan, Matthew Sabin will preview “The Eye of the Wolf” (Nathan, in bookstores on October 19) through live drawing in front of the audience, while he will be the godfather of 2023 and Daniel Benac will read the text of the novel The second in his long career, which in 2023 won the Grand Prix for Literature from the French Academy.

“Young people don’t cheat”

The genesis of this adaptation lies in an encounter. “I made him talk first,” says Mathieu Sabin. Many of the things that fuel this novel come from what Daniel Benach experienced. From then on, the settings quickly clicked for me, especially the botanical garden and the wolf cage that we find in the album. I also enjoyed posing with Daniel and putting myself in the picture. » In the first photocopy he showed to Mr. Benac, what was the ruling? “He made some remarks, but nothing bad. It was very important to me that he had an opinion, and I really wanted to show him that and see his reaction.”

Clearly it worked. Even if Matteo Sabin knows it well deep down, the truth comes from the mouths of children. For this children’s album, as for all the others, “young readers don’t cheat, they say what they think. The real reward is when the young audience reads with pleasure.”