Imaginary interview with Mose
by Charactorium · Mose (1300 av. J.-C. — ?) · Visual Arts · 5 min read
We imagined pushing open the door of a Parisian studio one afternoon in the late 1950s. Daylight falls on a drawing board cluttered with bristol boards, a half-empty bottle of India ink, and a bald scientist who seems to smile from a panel. Mose, whose real name is Moïse David, puts down his pen to talk about the character he brings to life every morning in the newspapers.
—How does one become the cartoonist of a character one did not invent?
In 1947, I was entrusted with a hero who already existed, born under another hand than mine—that of André Daix—more than ten years earlier. It's a strange situation: you inherit a face, a gait, an audience that expects its appointment, and you must slip your own fingers into it without the seam showing. I sign Mose at the bottom of the boards, but I walk in steps already traced. At first, I wondered if readers would sense the change of pen; then I understood that the scientist now belonged to me as much as to his creator, because it was I who, every day, decided on his next foolishness.
You inherit a face, a gait, and you must slip your own fingers into it without the seam showing.
—What allowed you to make this character last nearly twenty years?
Regularity, above all. A newspaper hero does not survive by his flashes but by his presence: he must be there, faithful, before the reader's eyes at breakfast, year after year. I carried this absent-minded scientist from the postwar period until the mid-1960s, and throughout that time I sought never to betray him while keeping him alive. One thinks a repurposed character is just a copy; I believe rather that he becomes a conversation between two cartoonists, the old and the new, across the decades. My task was to continue the sentence without changing the voice.
—You often make people laugh without a single word. Why this choice of silence?
Because the silent gag is the most honest form of drawing. If there is no speech, all the comedy must reside in the line, in the position of an arm, in the disaster brewing in the background of the panel. The reader does not read, he sees, and he laughs even before thinking. It's a cruel exercise for the cartoonist: impossible to salvage a failed image with a well-turned line. My scientist falls, bumps into things, invents machines that backfire on him, and I have only three or four panels to elicit a smile. Every gesture must carry weight, or the day is lost.
If there is no speech, all the comedy must reside in the line.
—What does it take to create a funny story that fits in four images?
Concision, and a kind of gentle cruelty toward one's hero. A brief sketch is like a plume charge: you set up the situation in the first panel, let the anticipation build in the second, and the punchline must strike in the last, without an extra word. I first sketch the idea in the morning, very quickly, to check that it makes me laugh even in scribbles. If the laughter isn't there in the rough, no careful inking will bring it out later. Newspaper drawing taught me this: humor is not in the finish, it is in the idea, and the idea must be bare.
—What does a workday paced by the newspaper look like?
It starts early, often with reading the dailies and sketching the day's ideas. Morning is for rough drafts; afternoon, for meticulous inking with pen and India ink on bristol board, that thick paper that soaks up black without bleeding. In the evening, I review the printed proofs or get ahead on the next strips. For the newspaper does not forgive: you must deliver every day, sometimes weeks in advance, to meet printing deadlines. You don't get sick when you're a newspaper cartoonist—or if you do, you arrange to be sick with two weeks' worth of gags in reserve.
You don't get sick when you're a newspaper cartoonist—or if you do, with two weeks' worth of gags in reserve.
—Does this daily deadline weigh on creation, or fuel it?
Both, inseparably. The constraint of the deadline is a tyranny, I won't deny it: impossible to wait for inspiration like a painter before his canvas, because the editorial office waits, the press runs, the reader will open his paper tomorrow no matter what. But this same tyranny forces you to find something, at all costs, and sometimes the best ideas are born from this urgency, when you no longer have the luxury of doubt. My drawing board is my clock as much as my studio. I believe the rhythm of daily life forged my hand more surely than any lesson: by having to be funny every day, you end up being funny without thinking.
—This bald scientist with a single hair has become an instantly recognizable silhouette. How does one work on such a figure?
Through consistency, panel after panel. That smooth skull topped with a single curled hair, shaped like a question mark, is the heart of everything: it's the first thing the eye recognizes, even before the facial expression. My role was not to reinvent it but to fix it, to make it so stable that a child could draw it from memory. A good newspaper character fits into a graphic signature that you identify in a tenth of a second, amid columns of text. I spent twenty years repeating this silhouette so that, in the reader's mind, it became as familiar as a neighbor on the landing.
—In your view, what does that little question-mark hair tell about him?
Everything about the character, actually. That single hair standing up like a question is the spirit of the scientist himself: perpetually searching, questioning, tinkering with improbable machines that will eventually blow up in his face. I didn't invent this detail, but I learned to make it vibrate, to make it the antenna of his absent-minded soul. When I ink it, I care for it as one cares for a gaze: that's where the comedy and tenderness reside. A bald man is nothing; a bald man with a hair that asks an eternal question is already a little drawn philosophy.
—You took over this character right after the war. What kind of environment did you enter?
A press that was being reborn. The Liberation had relaunched newspapers and humorous drawing, after the dark years of the Occupation when paper was scarce and censorship stifled everything. In 1947, when I picked up the pen, we were breathing again, even though the tables long remembered rationing—a simple meal, bread, vegetables, meat only on Sundays. It was a golden age beginning for comics, with illustrated magazines multiplying. My little scientist, born in the 1930s, thus traversed the eras: he had known the prewar period, and he was setting off again in a France that wanted to laugh anew.
—How did your quiet newspaper scientist experience the arrival of this new generation of comics?
With the elegance of an elder. Around me, Franco-Belgian comics were taking off tremendously: new magazines emerged, young heroes full of clamor conquered the newsstands in the late 1950s. My character, however, belonged to another tradition—that of the brief silent strip in the daily paper, closer to newspaper drawing than to adventure albums. I didn't feel outmoded for all that: each form has its place and its audience. The scientist continued his quiet little tune while the fanfares played alongside, and there was room, I believe, for both.
The scientist continued his quiet little tune while the fanfares played alongside.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Mose's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.