Jean Giraud
French comics author (1938–2012) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (French: [ʒiʁo]; 8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius (/ˈmoʊbiəs/;[1] French: [møbjys]) for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir (French: [ʒiʁ]), which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western themed work. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others,[2] he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.[3]
Jean Giraud | |
---|---|
Born | Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (1938-05-08)8 May 1938 Nogent-sur-Marne, France |
Died | 10 March 2012(2012-03-10) (aged 73) Montrouge, France |
Area(s) | Writer, Artist |
Pseudonym(s) | Gir, Moebius, Jean Gir |
Notable works | |
Collaborators | Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jean-Michel Charlier |
Awards | full list |
Spouse(s) | Claudine Conin (m. 1967–1994)Isabelle Champeval
(m. 1995–2012) |
Children |
|
Signature | |
moebius |
His most famous work as Gir concerns the Blueberry series, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first antiheroes in Western comics, and which is particularly valued in continental Europe. As Mœbius he achieved worldwide renown (in this case in the English-speaking nations and Japan as well – where his work as Gir had not done well), by creating a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic book series The Incal.
Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004 by French director Jan Kounen.
Jean Giraud was born in Nogent-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, in the suburbs of Paris, on 8 May 1938,[4][5] as the only child to Raymond Giraud, an insurance agent, and Pauline Vinchon, who had worked at the agency.[6] When he was three years old, his parents divorced and he was subsequently raised by mainly his grandparents, who were living in the neighboring municipality of Fontenay-sous-Bois (much later, when he was an acclaimed artist, Giraud returned to live in the municipality in the mid-1970s, but was unable to buy his grandparents' erstwhile house[7]). The rupture between mother and father created a lasting trauma that he explained lay at the heart of his choice of separate pen names.[8] A somewhat sickly and introverted child at first, young Giraud found solace after World War II in a small theater, located on a corner in the street where his mother lived, which concurrently provided an escape from the dreary atmosphere in postwar reconstruction-era France.[9] Playing an abundance of American B-movie Westerns, Giraud, frequenting the theater there as often as he was able to, developed a passion for the genre, as did so many other European boys his age in those times.[7]
At age 9–10, Giraud started to draw Western comics while enrolled by his single mother as a stop-gap measure in the Saint-Nicolas boarding school in Issy-les-Moulineaux for two years (and where he became acquainted with Belgian comic magazines such as Spirou and Tintin), much to the amusement of his schoolmates.[10] In 1954, at age 16,[11] he began his only technical training at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré, where he started producing Western comics, though these did not sit well with his conventional teachers.[12] At the college, he befriended other future comic artists Jean-Claude Mézières and Pat Mallet [fr]. With Mézières in particular, in no small part due to their shared passion for science fiction, Westerns and the Far West, Giraud developed a close, lifelong friendship,[13] calling him "life's continuing adventure" in later life.[14] In 1956, he left art school without graduating to visit his mother, who had married a Mexican in Mexico, and stayed there for nine months.
The experience of the Mexican desert, in particular its endless blue skies and unending flat plains, now seeing and experiencing for himself the vistas that had enthralled him so much when watching Westerns on the silver screen only a few years earlier, left an everlasting, "quelque chose qui m'a littéralement craqué l'âme" ("something which literally cracked open my soul"),[15] enduring impression on him, easily recognizable in almost all of his later seminal works.[15] After his return to France, he started to work as a full-time tenured artist for Catholic publisher Fleurus presse [fr],[16] to whom he was introduced by Mézières, who had shortly before found employment at the publisher.[17][10] In 1959–1960, he was slated for military service in, firstly the French occupation zone of Germany, and subsequently Algeria,[18] in the throes of the vicious Algerian War at the time. Fortunately for him, however, he somehow managed to escape frontline duty as he – being the only service man available at the time with a graphics background – served out his military obligations being set to work as illustrator on the army magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises, besides being assigned to logistic duties. Algeria was Giraud's second acquaintance with other, more exotic cultures, and like he did in Mexico, he soaked in the experience, which made another indelible impression on the young man born as a suburban city boy, leaving its traces in his later comics, especially those created as "Mœbius".[7]