Tom Tirabosco: Comics Between Nature and Spirituality

L’œil de la forêt, Casterman, 2003 et les Arts dessinés, 2024

 

Tom Tirabosco, born in Rome in 1966 and raised in Geneva, is one of the most important contemporary Swiss comic book authors and illustrators. After studying at the Geneva School of Fine Arts, he developed a personal and poetic style, capable of combining printmaking, children’s illustration, and works of a more committed and political nature. At the center of his research are nature, animals, biodiversity, and ecological themes, addressed with a sensitivity alternating between lyricism and biting irony. Among his best-known works are Wonderland, Kongo, and Femme sauvage. Alongside his work as an author, Tirabosco contributed to the creation of the Higher School of Comics and Illustration of Geneva, where he teaches. Awarded with prizes such as the Prix Rodolphe-Töpffer and the Grand Prix de Sierre, he is today a central figure in the Swiss comic book scene.

This article is based on an interview conducted in Geneva in May 2025, focusing in particular on questions related to spirituality, nature, and ecology. Like many other artists studied in this Religiomics project (see Anders Nilsen, David B., and Lorenzo Mattotti), Tirabosco makes use of narratives, symbols, and religious allusions, without however identifying with any specific religious practice or identity. This cannot be reduced to a simple secular reading or a commodification of the religious, but represents a complex and ambiguous relationship between art and the sacred.

 

Tom Tirabosco in his studio, Genève 2025, Photo of Francesco Piraino

 

Tirabosco grew up in a Catholic family on his father’s side and Protestant on his mother’s. His father, an admirer of Nietzsche, is “totally atheist,” and young Tom often heard him declare during his childhood: “God is dead!” From the age of twelve, he attended an evangelical movement, which he left during adolescence because of their excessive dogmatism. Tirabosco declares himself agnostic, without religious practice; however, he says he has “the desire to believe” in something higher, something transcendent: “For me, it is in nature that the divine manifests itself, that a divine force expresses itself.” Nevertheless, this aspiration does not translate into an actual practice: he acknowledges never having felt “a calling,” never having identified with any system, faith, or doctrine.

His desire to believe thus expresses itself in a negative form, echoing, in a certain sense, negative theology unconsciously. It appears in the desire to “let go,” in silence, in fear, and in the weirdness that one can experience through art and nature:

 

“Knowing how to let go and stop being constantly in absolute control, it’s true that it is something that interests me to explore. This is connected to the question of spirituality because I think that in spirituality there is also the idea of letting go, of surrendering to something greater. Trusting in a force, in the creator, in God, in Gaia, in the Mystery, also means abandoning the hubris of Humans and the materialist arrogance of wanting absolutely to understand everything, explain everything, and discover everything. And today, this question haunts me: ‘And if our possible extinction were the fruit of our arrogance in taking ourselves for God?’ This is also the subject of my next graphic reportage: the excesses of techno-science. This is what frightens me today: our ultra-materialist evolution that no longer leaves any room for mystery and no longer leaves any room for the spiritual dimension in our relationship with the world and with nature.”

Wonderland, Atrabile, 2015

 

Tirabosco sees in spirituality a means of elevation, as is the case in Tarkovsky’s films:

“One of my favorite filmmakers is Tarkovsky, who really is the filmmaker of spirituality, even of religiosity. His cinema is haunted by the search and quest for the spiritual. I love Tarkovsky because he uses art and poetry as a way of accessing this spiritual dimension. His films ‘nourish’ me. I love the way he speaks about our human condition. This comes through images of great beauty, always linked with nature, silence, slowness, everything that today, I feel, we lack.”

The sublime and fear are also central to Tirabosco’s aesthetics:

“For me, in the sublime, there is this idea of finitude, of melancholy, and also a form of dread, of fear. The strange is a stylistic figure that I love in the arts in general. In cinema, I love the poetry and contemplation of Tarkovsky’s films, but I also adore the strangeness of David Lynch’s films. Nature can also be associated with this feeling of dread, as in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or Léon Spilliaert… Fear is a feeling that allows us to feel alive and embodied. ‘The uncanny,’ Freud’s formula, is a figure that I like a lot.”

The experience of nature constitutes another axis of Tirabosco’s restless spirituality. Love for nature was born in his childhood, when Tom spent as much time as possible in the forests and countryside and became passionate about studying and drawing animals, as he recounts in one of his most autobiographical works, Wonderland. This love for nature would later be transformed into ecological activism.

Affiche pour les Vert.e.s de Genève

Tirabosco questions the extractivist paradigm of our modern capitalist model and advocates for degrowth. His commitments have often led him to collaborate with WWF and with ecological parties in his country. Finally, he is preparing to move to an eco-village in the Geneva countryside, where construction materials will be used in order to minimize the ecological footprint, and where common spaces will also allow for sharing and pooling experiences and objects, such as cars, for example.

« Pour résumé, je suis devenu écologiste parce que j’ai passé du temps dans cette nature, enfant. C’est au contact de celle-ci que j’ai compris son importance et sa beauté. C’est parce que je la trouve immensément belle que j’ai envie de la défendre. Plus que le point de vue utilitariste et scientifique de devoir la protéger, c’est sa valeur esthétique qui me donne envie de me battre pour sa préservation et sa protection. La nature est le lieu du sacré pour moi et donc on en revient encore au spirituel… on ne peut pas sacrifier ou détruire la beauté. C’est sacré la beauté!

Tirabosco is aware of being in good company with many contemporaries who live a kind of eco-spirituality (see, for example, the work of Irene Becci on eco-spirituality). This does not prevent him from joking about it, underlining the amorphous nature of his spirituality, which he calls a “neo-hippie spirituality, fashionable at the moment.” At the same time, Tirabosco acknowledges the contradictions and the risks of romanticizing the relationship between human beings and nature, questioning the inevitable anthropocentrism of his gaze. As, for example, when one of the characters of Femme sauvage says: “Humanity is nothing but a little ejaculation of nothingness in the universe!”

Femme sauvage, Futuropolis, 2019

In Tirabosco’s works, the relationship between human beings and nature is as ambiguous as his restless spirituality. The human being seems to be the guardian of the beauty of nature, but much more often, from his stories emerges an eschatological and apocalyptic dimension, which highlights human responsibilities—particularly toxic masculinity—in the climate crisis and the collapse of biodiversity. In other cases, the human being seems to be only a small fragment of the complex mosaic that is nature. Finally, sometimes, as in La fin du monde, the moral and psychological crisis is inexplicably linked to the fate of nature: healing oneself means healing the world.

La fin du Monde, Futuropolis, 2008