Marguerite Abouet is an African cartoonist born at Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 1971. At twelve years old Abouet and her brother were sent to Paris, France to study and reside with their maternal great-uncle. After ending her studies before graduation, Abouet pursued a career in writing. At present, she lives Romainville, Paris, with her spouse [...]
The very first adventure of Adèle Blanc-Sec throws the protagonist into an incredibly convoluted plot that involves spiritism, remote viewing, a resurrected pterodactyl, a flying machine resembling that creature, the entire Paris police force, a mysterious theft, mistaken identities and forlorn lovers. If one can describe the entire series as a mix of the [...]
Albert Uderzo was born in Fismes (France) to Italian immigrant parents. In 1934 he obtained French citizenship and in 1940 he was employed by the Société Parisienne d'Édition, where he learned the fundamentals of text design and edition. After spending a period in Brittany during the war helping his father in his furniture business, [...]
Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical weekly magazine. It was created in 1970 as a successor to monthly Hara-Kiri, banned by the authorities following a controversial headline mocking the recent death of former President Charles de Gaulle. The magazine’s title is a tribute to Peanuts’s character Charlie Brown (as well as an inside joke [...]
In a sense, it could be argued that the Genevan artist Rodophe Töpffer (1799-1846), generally considered the founding father of modern Francophone (and European) comics, invented most of the features of modern comics storytelling. His work was a radical innovation to the tradition of the single broadsheet, poorly colored and heavily captioned, woodcut storytelling [...]
The career of Jean Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius, the name through which is known outside the French-speaking world, spans over six decades and across many genres and series. His first professional experience was an apprenticeship under Joseph “Jijé” Gillain, drawing some pages for the Western series Jerry Spring. It was from this collaboration that the [...]
René Goscinny (1926 - 1977) was born in Paris, but his family, of Polish origin, had to move to Argentina when he was two years old. He studied at the French Lycée in Buenos Aires and graduated in Fine Arts in 1942. After his father passed away, he had to work as an illustrator [...]
Marcel Gotlieb was born in Paris in 1934. His parents were Hungarian Jews. At eight years old his father was arrested by the French police and deported to Buchenwald where he died in 1945. Marcel escaped two dragnets and was sent to live in a farm, then to an orphanage. Gotlib later drew a [...]
L'Ascension du Haut Mal is an autobiography by David B. (the nom de plume of Pierre-François Beauchard, b. 1959). Told in the first-person, the book depicts the life of the artist since his young age into adulthood. The story itself, however, gravitates around his older brother, Jean-Christophe, and his bouts with epilepsy (the original [...]
La bête est morte! (The Beast is Dead!) is a French graphic novel which was published as a children’s book in two volumes in 1944 and 1945. It was created during Nazi occupation of France and is often referred to by its subtitle, La Guerre Mondiale chez les Animaux (World War II Among the [...]