How I Conquered France

A funny, ironic, profound, and slightly melancholic story of an artist obsessed with success.

 

Ville is a young comic book author full of ambition who has just started a promising career, with a few books to his credit and a bit of notoriety in his home country. He only dreams of one thing: to see his work published in France, the promised land of comics, that of the authors he admires, where happiness and success are within reach of any talented artist.

 

One day, Ville’s dream finally seems to come true: one of the most popular authors in France offers to collaborate with him on an album that a major French publisher will publish. Happiness and success seem to be close at hand, and Ville rushes to Paris to seize the opportunity. But once there, things do not go exactly as he imagined, and Ville soon realizes that all that glitters isn’t gold…

 

Irony, humor, and a good dose of self-deprecation punctuate the pages of this strongly autobiographical tale in which Ville Ranta depicts, with remarkable frankness, the adventures of an artist in the almost obsessive pursuit of success and fortune. Between the lines, Ranta does not fail to evoke the difficult, and sometimes downright impossible, relationship between creativity and commercial success, while painting a vitriolic portrait of the world of publishing.