My brothers and I grew up in the seventies. It was a time before computer games and personal computers.  Oh, there was Atari; but Pong got boring after a half-an-hour, and if you played it any longer it had a hypnotizing effect. Then towards the end of the seventies they installed Space Invaders , Asteroids and Galaxian arcade games at the local fish-and-chip shops. However, a weekly allowance of fifty cents bought us two and half goes at it, or alternatively, an extremely large bag of mixed confectionery - the confectionery usually won out . Thus, many of our recreational hours were spent reading Asterix or Tintin. These books were great reading and I still enjoy them today.

Nevertheless, one of my favourite cartoon books, back then, was Patatrac. It was a wonderful book with no words, just humorous cartoon drawings by Jean Jacques Loup; the popular French jigsaw artist. I would spend hours with my head in this book, studying Loup’s work, and then I would pick up pencil and paper and try to copy his drawings. The book Patatrac was and still is an inspiration for me.

I  believe patatras means ‘crash’ in French, and Patatrac is full of drawings of train, plane and automobile crashes - or collisions of sort; so the word patatrac may be a verb conjugation of patatras. However I may well be wrong as I never studied the French language.

The drawings by Loup are highly detailed and very clever. Each drawing is spread over two pages and carries a theme. Below are a number of examples taken from Patatrac. These are only snippets, so keep in the mind the full drawings are much larger. Take time to look at the detail in each drawing. Loup is a genius. His colouring work is brilliant and I imagine was accomplished without the aid of computer graphics programs.

Below is the full drawing, spanning two pages, however the detail is hard to see at this size. Although, I would like to have shown it larger I do not wish to encroach upon Loup’s copyright or intellectual property. The binding in the middle of the copy of the book I scanned is worn.

There are ten drawings in Patatrac; each is highly detailed and some of them quite complex. It is evident that Loup did plenty of research before putting pencil to paper. The most detailed drawing from Patatrac, - I believe - is the collision of the Spanish Galleons. I have included a snippet of this drawing below.

Patatrac was published in 1975 and I believe it is now out of print. I have searched many online second-hand bookstores for this publication and prices range from US $20.00 for a poor quality copy up to US $120.00 for a copy in good condition. It seems the book is becoming somewhat of a rarity. These samples above were scanned from the copy that my mother owns. She kept it after all these years, bless her.

I recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for highly detailed and humorous cartoon drawings. Good luck trying to get hold of Patatrac in mint condition. I hope one day they release it again for publishing.

Loup’s jigsaws are still available today and are equally as impressive.

Paul J Duffield