G.D. Truc: The Man, The Book

G.D. TRUC is not politically correct. He has a severely over-sized ego and simply cannot get enough of himself. He fancies himself a sportsman, an artist, a philosopher and a master of seduction…a citizen of the world who has the answers to almost every major problem facing the world today. Truc (which means thing in French) is a French cartoon character created by Canadian artist Scott MacLeay in Paris where he worked as a photographer and composer for thirty years until moving to Brazil in 2010. MacLeay recalls, G.D. Truc was comic relief. I started drawing him when I was working day and night in the darkroom on the Fragments Series of photographs in 1981. I think it was a simple question of sanity. He just arrived out of nowhere. His personality evolved quickly and before I knew it he was quite a complex fellow. He never smiled and had an uncanny knack for misunderstanding relatively straightforward situations. I grew to like the guy. There was something touching about his naivete and his larger than life inadvertent buffoonery. This book is a character snapshot of this almost lovable character with drawings dating from his creation in Paris in 1981 until the present. The ever-expressionless TRUC can be very charming and is not completely devoid of wit, although we tend to laugh at him more than we laugh with him. Some say that the more we see of him the more we grow to love him. Vast Program as General de Gaulle once replied to a heckler who had cried out Death to idiots . Well, perhaps this unorthodox cartoon biography will help people to make up their own minds about this bohemian Parisian megalomaniac.