Jean Giraud

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (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 for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir, which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western themed work.

Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.

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.

Jean Giraud was born in Nogent-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, in the suburbs of Paris, on 8 May 1938, as the only child to Raymond Giraud, an insurance agent, and Pauline Vinchon, who had worked at the agency.

In 1954, at age 16, 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.

At the college, he befriended other future comic artists Jean-Claude Mézières and Pat Mallet.

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, calling him "life's continuing adventure" in later life.

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"), enduring impression on him, easily recognizable in almost all of his later seminal works.

After his return to France, he started to work as a full-time tenured artist for Catholic publisher Fleurus presse, to whom he was introduced by Mézières, who had shortly before found employment at the publisher.

Tenured at publisher Fleurus from 1956 to 1958 after his first sales, Giraud did so, but concurrently continued to steadfastly create realistically drawn Western comics (alongside several others of a French historical nature) and illustrations for magazine editorials in their magazines Fripounet et Marisette, Cœurs Vaillants, and Âmes vaillantes – all of them of a strong, edifying nature aimed at France's adolescent youth – up to a point that his realistically drawn comics had become his mainstay.

Among his realistic Westerns was a comic called "Le roi des bisons" ("King of the Buffalo" – has had an English publication ), and another called "Un géant chez lez Hurons" ("A Giant with the Hurons").

Actually, several of his Western comics, including "King of the Buffalo", featured the same protagonist Art Howell, and these can be considered as Giraud's de facto first realistic Western series, as he himself did in effect, since he, save the first one, endowed these stories with the subtitle "Un aventure d'Art Howell".

For Fleurus, Giraud also illustrated his first three books.

Already in this period, his style was heavily influenced by his later mentor, Belgian comic artist Joseph "Jijé" Gillain, who at that time was the major source of inspiration for an entire generation of young, aspiring French comic artists, including Giraud's friend Mézières, interested in doing realistically drawn comics.

How major Jijé's influence was on these young artists, was amply demonstrated by the Fleurus publications these youngsters submitted their work to, as their work strongly resembled each other.

For example, two of the books Giraud illustrated for Fleurus, were co-illustrated with Guy Mouminoux, another name of some future renown in the Franco-Belgian comic world, and Giraud's work can only be identified, because he signed his work, whereas Mouminoux did not sign his.

While not ample, Giraud's earnings at Fleurus were just enough to allow him – disenchanted as he was with the courses, prevalent atmosphere, and academic discipline – to quit his art academy education after only two years, though he came to somewhat regret the decision in later life.

Shortly before he entered military service, Giraud visited his idol at his home for the first time with Mézières and Mallet, followed by a few visits on his own to see the master at work for himself.

In 1959–1960, he was slated for military service in, firstly the French occupation zone of Germany, and subsequently Algeria, 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".

At 18, Giraud was drawing his own humorous, Morris-inspired, Western comic two-page shorts, Frank et Jeremie, for the magazine Far West, his first freelance commercial sales.

Magazine editor Marijac thought young Giraud was gifted with a knack for humorous comics, but none whatsoever for realistically drawn comics, and advised him to continue in the vein of "Frank et Jeremie".

For Jijé, Giraud created several other shorts and illustrations for the short-lived magazine Bonux-Boy (1960/61), his first comic work after military service, and his penultimate one before embarking on Blueberry.

In this period, Jijé used his apprentice for the inks on an outing of his Western series Jerry Spring – after whom Giraud had, unsurprisingly, modeled his Art Howell character previously – "The Road to Coronado", which Giraud inked.

In 1961, returning from military service and his stint on 5/5 Forces Françaises, Giraud, not wanting to return to Fleurus, as he felt that he "had to do something else, if he ever wanted to evolve", became an apprentice of Jijé on his invitation, after he saw that Giraud had made artistic progress during his stay at 5/5 Forces Françaises.

Jijé was then one of the leading comic artists in Europe and known for his gracious tendency to voluntarily act as a mentor for young, aspiring comic artists, of whom Giraud was but one, going even as far as opening up his family home in Champrosay for days on end for these youngsters which, again, included Giraud.

In this, Jijé resembled Belgian comic grandmaster Hergé, but unlike Jijé, Hergé only did so on a purely commercial basis, never on a voluntarily one.

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 ).

The rupture between mother and father created a lasting trauma that he explained lay at the heart of his choice of separate pen names.

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.

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.

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.

Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004 by French director Jan Kounen.