Comics Alternative Interviews: Youssef Daoudi

The Comics Alternative

Time Codes:

• 00:00:24 - Introduction
• 00:02:22 - Setup of interview
• 00:04:01 - Interview with Youssef Daoudi
• 01:52:10 - Wrap up
• 01:52:47 - Contact us

Youssef Daoudi is a French creator whose previous albums include La Trilogie Noire, published by Casterman, and several works released by Glénat, including Mayday, Ring, and Tripoli. Unfortunately, these books aren’t yet available in English, but you can discover the art and storytelling of Daoudi through his brand new book from First Second, Monk!: Thelonious, Pannonica, and the Friendship behind a Musical Revolution. Indeed, as Youssef discusses with me in this interview you’re about to here, Monk!is his first work to be written originally in English, and later to be translated into French. This isn’t a graphic biography of the jazz legend, often called “The Mad Monk” or “The High Priest of Bop,” but a portrait of his relationship with Kathleen Annie Pannoica de Koenigswarter, a free-spirted and jazz-impassioned baroness who was a member of the Rothschild family. Daoudi meticulously lays out the contours of that relationship and how each sustained the other. In our conversation Derek talks with Youssef about the genesis of this project, his love of jazz, and what it was about mid-century bebop culture -- and in particular, the lives of Monk and Pannonica -- that so captured his imagination.