François BOURGEON

François Bourgeon en 2022 © Vincent Mouchel, Ouest-France

François BOURGEON is a French comic book artist and writer.
Born in Paris, just after the war, his father, a journalist, destined him for medicine, but young François could only think about drawing and comic books...
He was published from the early 1970s and began his career solely as an artist, working on scripts by Henriette Bichonnier for Bayard Presse and Fleurus Presse. He then regularly published in Lisette, a weekly magazine for teenage girls, which became one of his trademarks: having a heroine as the main character in his major works.
In 1978, with a script by Pierre Dhombre, he published Maître Guillaume and the Journal of Cathedral Builders (already expressing his love for the Middle Ages) and began his first series with Robert Genin: Brunelle and Colin, of which he only contributed to the first two albums, embarking on a more personal adventure, that of the Passengers of the Wind. But already, in Brunelle, there is a hint of the future Isa. Bourgeon's style and stroke become more defined and refined.
So it was in the early 1980s that The Passengers of the Wind were born. As a writer and artist, Bourgeon made a masterstroke, immediately acclaimed by critics (he was awarded the Best Artist prize at the Angoulême Festival in 1980) and the public (each of the albums sold over a million copies in French). Additionally, the series was translated into 18 languages!
In 1984, he returned to the Middle Ages with The Companions of Twilight, which also enjoyed considerable success.
In 1993, the Cyann Cycle began, created in collaboration with Claude Lacroix. This time, Bourgeon explored the world of science fiction and provided it with incredible visual richness. This commitment to quality and research, present in all of François Bourgeon's work, is one of the strengths of the artist. Bourgeon creates complex, rich, and abundant worlds that allow readers complete and unforgettable immersion!
In 2009 and 2010, he added two volumes to the Passengers of the Wind with The Little Girl of Bois Caïman, which follows the adventures of Zabo in Louisiana during the years of the Civil War. This leap in time helps to understand what happened to Isa in Saint-Domingue, where the album The Ebony Wood left our heroine at the end of the fifth volume of the series.
Starting in 2018, Bourgeon gives a "third cycle" to the Passengers of the Wind with The Blood of Cherries, where we find Zabo, 20 years after Louisiana, in the midst of the Paris Commune, once again addressing the intricacies of the birth of democracies. Bourgeon once again takes history by the horns.