My name is Éthienne, with an “h,” and my story starts out badly.

What a family! Éthienne has 56 brothers, a giddy mother and a preoccupied father. His crazily distorted world sparks the kinds of questions every teenager wants to answer and avoid at the same time: Who am I? Where do I come from? What did I do to deserve this?

Francis Monty is ready. Standing behind a table, the writer, storyteller and performer lays out his equipment: drawings hastily scrawled on bits of paper, an eclectic assortment of household objects. Armed with daring and tons of imagination, he tackles the story, launching his young protagonist on a series of hallucinatory adventures. Along the way Éthienne struggles to make sense of his experiences, from the day of his birth to his discovery of his shadow self by way of a confrontation with his father, dipping into dream and reality, fantasy and irony.

A founding member of La Pire Espèce, that fraternity of joyful demiurges, Francis relapses with another dazzling display of theatre of objects, with a few sly nods to comic-book lingo.