Charlie Hebdo Cartoonist: "I Honestly Didn't Know If I Could Still Draw"
[There was a video here]
The surviving members of Charle Hebdo held a press conference this morning to discuss last week's massacre and how they prepared the magazine's new issue. "I honestly didn't know if I could still draw," cartoonist Rénald Luzier—better known as Luz —told reporters.
"We thought for a long time that drawing to explain this complicated world like when we were kids would protect us from the stupidity in this world," Luz said. "Terrorists were kids one day, they drew, like us, like all kids. And at one point they must have lost their humor."
He discussed this week's cover, which he drew. "I had Mohammed with 'Je suis Charlie' and he was crying," he said. "And I wrote 'All is forgiven' above. And I cried. I cried but I also laughed."
"I drew, I cried, and we had this fucking front page," he added. "I have no worries about the topic of the frontpage. Because I trust that people are smart. People who committed this attack were people who didn't have a sense of humor."
After thanking Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney for subscribing, editor-in-chief Gerard Briard spoke about the Charlie's future.
"There is a future, but we don't know yet what it will resemble," he said. "There will be a newspaper. There will be no interruption. That is to say that in two weeks' time in kiosks there will be a new edition of Charlie Hebdo. We'll see which one. For the time being we can't tell you any more because we don't know ourselves."