It wasn't about weltschmerz, but it didn't make the sauce any less

Rarely have I seen two female artists at a table more different from each other than Dominique Goblet and Leela Corman. Two female comic artists, on either side of Peter Breedveld who is flown in every year as a connoisseur of the comic genre at Writers Unlimited.

Corman, a comic artist as well as a dancer, writes her stories in a fairly recognisable style. Impressive stories, historical, like her latest novel Meideles, but always fitting into the 'comic' genre.

Walloon Dominique Goblet is a visual artist who actually happens to publish her work in book form. During her conversation with Breedveld, it turns out that the latter clearly has a bit more trouble interpreting her style, than he had with Corman's work.

Goblet works intuitively, actually striving for a totally different style in each work and doing her utmost to escape frameworks that the environment wants to apply to her work. However, what could have been a fascinating conversation got stuck in generalities. Breedveld tried to find out something more about the specifically feminine nature of both women's work, and whether this marked the beginning of and new movement of female comic book authors. But both women rightly riposted that women have been setting the tone in the visual genre for years, and that it is only the male colleagues who want to push them into a specific, usually autobiographical, pigeonhole.

After an hour, the conversation came to an end, to which an onlooker wondered whether, apart from sex and comics, they were going to talk about weltschmerz, the third word in the title of this section of the programme at Writers Unlimited. To that, all three speakers replied that they actually had no idea what weltschmerz meant. To which Leela Corman concluded the presentation with the legendary words: 'no idea what it means, but it is the most beautifully titled panel discussion I have ever participated in.'

Afterwards, it also turned out to be mostly about a special bottle of highly concentrated pepper sauce, on which was written a text that, for Goblet, was the perfect summary of her work, and which, for a single fan, turned out to be worth a whole trip. We have the footage of the tasting. Backstage corny warning is in force.