Didier Conrad | |
|---|---|
 Didier Conrad at Lucca Comics & Games 2015 | |
| Born | 6 May 1959 Marseille, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Website | Didier Conrad on Weebly |
Didier Conrad (born 6 May 1959) is a French comics artist and writer. Since 2012, he has been the artist of the popular Asterix series.
Didier Conrad was born in Marseille of parents originally from Switzerland. He developed a passion for comics and, at age 14, he sent a page to Journal de Spirou that was published in a page reserved for new talents. Five years later, in 1978, Conrad published his first comics series in the magazine: "Jason", written by Mythic. Spirou editor Thierry Martens put him in touch with another aspiring comics author also from Marseille: Yann Le Pennetier. The pair hit it off despite having quite different personalities and decided to work together. [1]
After publishing a few short comics in Spirou together in which they collaborated on both the writing and art, Yann & Conrad were tasked by the new editor Alain de Kuyssche with adding doodles and jokes in the top margin of the magazine's pages. This was generally considered a chore by the magazine's contributors, but Yann & Conrad shook things up by spoofing and sometimes outright insulting the series straight below their work. This caused a controversy at the magazine, during which they were defended by the magazine's veteran artist André Franquin, who felt they were regenerating a now stale publication. The pair was next asked to devise an action series in the style of another Spirou star character, Buck Danny, then on a hiatus. They appeared to comply, teasing a new series to be called "Chuck Willys", apparently starring a square-jawed all-American war hero. This character however was run over by a Jeep in the second panel, never to be seen again, and the series retitled Les Innommables (the Unnamables). Les Innommables was originally written by Conrad, who was busy drawing "Jason", and drawn by Yann, but recognising their respective strengths, they eventually switched tasks. The series broke every possible taboo in a comics magazine aimed at children, featuring violence, sex and cruelty, and the pair were eventually sacked in 1982. During their period at Spirou, Conrad and Yann both still lived in Marseille and would spend the odd week in Brussels, staying in a guest room in the magazine's building. They later boasted that they would frequently break into the offices at night and read all the internal correspondence about themselves.
Yann and Conrad went in search of a new magazine to publish their work and ended up at Circus , a publication recently launched by publisher Glénat. Turning down a request to do more "top margin" works, they instead resurrected a series started earlier at Spirou and called "Bob Marone", a spoof of the best-selling pulp novel and comics series "Bob Morane" by Henri Vernes. Two albums telling a single time-travelling story about a hunt for a white dinosaur were published, but Yann and Conrad fell out before the end and Conrad finished the second story with his girlfriend Sophie Commenge (using the pen name "Lucie") as writer.
After parting with Yann, Conrad reduced his output and began working with Sophie Commenge, now using her real name, on a new character called Ernest Poildu, One album only came out, though a second story was partly published in a quarterly magazine. Conrad published no new album in the second half of the 1980s.
In 1990, Conrad returned to Dupuis, the publishing house behind Spirou magazine, which had somewhat modernised since the early 1980s and had launched a new album collection called "Aire Libre" giving authors some editorial freedom. Conrad reused his character Ernest Poildu in a new two-part story called "Le Piège Malais" ("The Malay Trap") and published a limited run album called "Tatum: La Machine Écarlate". He then produced a new series titled "Donito", the adventures of a little boy who talks to animals which is set in the Caribbean. For this series, Conrad finally turned his back on the provocations of his previous works and drew more inspiration from Walt Disney.
In 1994, Conrad reunited with Yann to resurrect their now cult series Les Innommables, which had ended abruptly when they were sacked by Spirou. The existing albums were remade and more episodes produced, turning the series into a more coherent saga with several successive story arcs, set respectively in Hong Kong, Korea and the US. The order of the albums was modified several times to fit the original one-shot stories within the saga.
At the same time as Les Innommables returned, a spin-off series of the very popular Lucky Luke character by Morris appeared, titled Kid Lucky and purporting to show the character as a child, a popular trope in 1990s comics. This was credited to writer Jean Léturgie and artist Pearce, whose style resembled that of Conrad remarkably. When Morris and his publisher scrapped the series after two albums, it emerged that Pearce was actually Yann & Conrad sharing both writing and drawing duties as they had done at the beginning of their collaboration. The pair had decided to use a pen name for a series aimed at children to differentiate it from the rest of their joint output. Jean Léturgie and "Pearce" then launched a series in the same style called Cotton Kid and published five albums between 1999 and 2002.
In 1996, Conrad was hired by DreamWorks Animation to work on the film The Road to El Dorado . He moved to the United States to do so, but continued to work on comics as well, working simultaneously on Les Innommables, Kid Lucky then Cotton Kid, and more Bob Marone stories for Fluide Glacial magazine. Bob Marone was now written by Yann & Conrad and drawn by another artist, Yoann using the pen name Janus. Yann & Conrad also created a new spin-off series of Les Innommables titled Tigresse Blanche ("White Tiger") and focusing on the character of Alix Yin Fu, a female shaolin fighter and CCP trainee spy. This prequel series is set several years before Les Innommables, at the time of the Chinese Civil War. Conrad drew seven Tigresse Blanche albums in total, the first two written with Yann and another five with Sophie Commenge, now using the pen name Wilbur.
In 2012, Albert Uderzo chose Conrad and writer Jean-Yves Ferri to take over the best-selling series Asterix, which Uderzo had created with René Goscinny in 1959 and continued on his own since the latter's death in 1977. Conrad and Ferri released the 35th Asterix adventure, Asterix and the Picts , in October 2013, and the 36th, Asterix and the Missing Scroll in October 2015. The 37th album, Asterix and the Chariot Race , was released on 19 October 2017; [2] the 38th, Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter , in 2019; and the 39th – their fifth – Asterix and the Griffin , in 2021.
For the 2023 release of the 40th Asterix album, Asterix and the White Iris , Conrad worked with a new scriptwriter, Fabcaro.
Asterix is a bande dessinée comic book series about a village of indomitable Gaulish warriors who adventure around the world and fight the odds of the Roman Republic, with the aid of a magic potion, during the era of Julius Caesar, in an ahistorical telling of the time after the Gallic Wars.
René Goscinny was a French comic editor and writer, who created the Astérix comic book series with illustrator Albert Uderzo. He was raised primarily in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he attended French schools, as well as lived in the United States for a short period of time. There he met Belgian cartoonist Morris. After his return to France, they collaborated for more than 20 years on the comic series Lucky Luke.
Alberto Aleandro Uderzo, better known as Albert Uderzo, was a French comic book artist and scriptwriter. He is best known as the co-creator and illustrator of the Astérix series in collaboration with René Goscinny. He also drew other comics such as Oumpah-pah, again with Goscinny. Uderzo retired in September 2011.
Marsupilami is a comic book character and fictional animal species created by André Franquin. Its first appearance was in the 31 January 1952 issue of the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Spirou. Since then it appeared regularly in the popular Belgian comics series Spirou & Fantasio, as a pet of the main characters, until Franquin stopped working on the series; the character's final appearance in the series during Franquin's lifetime was in 1970.
Lucky Luke is a Western bande dessinée series created by Belgian cartoonist Morris in 1946. Morris wrote and drew the series single-handedly until 1955, after which he started collaborating with French writer René Goscinny. Their partnership lasted until Goscinny's death in 1977. Afterwards, Morris used several other writers until his own death in 2001. Since Morris's death, French artist Achdé has drawn the series, scripted by several successive writers.
Spirou is a weekly Belgian comics magazine published by the Dupuis company since April 21, 1938. It is an anthology magazine with new features appearing regularly, containing a mix of short humor strips and serialized features, of which the most popular series would be collected as albums by Dupuis afterwards.
Notable events of 1961 in comics.
Spirou & Fantasio, commonly shortened to Spirou, is one of the most popular classic Franco-Belgian comics. The series, which has been running since 1938, shares many characteristics with other European humorous adventure comics like The Adventures of Tintin, Lucky Luke, and Asterix. It has been written and drawn by a succession of artists.
Pilote was a French comics magazine published from 1959 to 1989. Showcasing most of the major French or Belgian comics talents of its day the magazine introduced major series such as Astérix, Barbe-Rouge, Blueberry, Achille Talon, and Valérian et Laureline. Major comics writers like René Goscinny, Jean-Michel Charlier, Greg, Pierre Christin and Jacques Lob were featured in the magazine, as were artists such as Jijé, Morris, Albert Uderzo, Jean (Mœbius) Giraud, Enki Bilal, Jean-Claude Mézières, Jacques Tardi, Philippe Druillet, Marcel Gotlib, Alexis, and Annie Goetzinger.
Asterix and the Falling Sky is the thirty-third volume of the Asterix comic book series, the ninth solely written and illustrated by Albert Uderzo and the only volume to introduce science fiction elements into the otherwise historical comedy series. The book was intended as a tribute to Walt Disney and a satire on the state of the French comics industry. It was released on October 14, 2005 to commercial success, but was panned by the critics. This was the final volume produced by Uderzo before handing over the series to a new creative team.
Jean-Michel Charlier was a Belgian comics writer. He was a co-founder of the famed Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote.
All the Asterix stories, created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, have been translated into English. The vast majority of the albums were translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Their first volume, Asterix the Gaul, was published by Brockhampton Press in 1969. Bell retired in 2016 due to ill health and died in 2018; Hockridge died in 2013. Adriana Hunter currently serves as translator, with Asterix and the Chariot Race being her debut.
Adriana Hunter is a British translator of French literature. She is known for translating over 60 French novels, such as Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb or The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa. She has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice. In 2011 she won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea. In 2013, she won the 27th Annual Translation Prize founded by the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation for her translation of Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (2013). She is also a contributor to Words Without Borders. She lives in Kent, England. In 2017, she became the English translator for new comic albums in the Asterix series.
Les Innommables is a Franco-Belgian comic series written by Yann le Pennetier and drawn by Didier Conrad. It began publication in serialized form in 1980 in Spirou magazine and was eventually published in album form by Dargaud.
Asterix and the Picts is the 35th book in the Asterix series, and is the first book to be written by someone other than René Goscinny or Albert Uderzo. It was written by Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrated by Didier Conrad. The English-language version was translated by Anthea Bell.
Jean-Yves Ferri is a French writer, designer, and colourist of comics.
Asterix and the Missing Scroll is the 36th book in the Asterix comics series, and the second written by Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrated by Didier Conrad. A central theme is censorship and the battle over information. The title alludes to Julius Caesar's classic book, Commentarii de Bello Gallico. The comic adds a fictitious Chapter 24 titled "Defeats at the Hands of the Indomitable Gauls of Armorica".
Asterix and the Chieftain's Daughter is the 38th book in the Asterix series, and the fourth to be written by Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrated by Didier Conrad. The book was released worldwide in more than 20 languages on 24 October 2019 with an initial print run of over 5 million copies.
Asterix and the Griffin is the 39th book in the Asterix series, and the fifth to be written by Jean-Yves Ferri and illustrated by Didier Conrad. The book was released worldwide in more than 20 languages on 21 October 2021 with an initial print run of over 5 million copies. It is the first Asterix book to be released since the death of the series' co-creator Albert Uderzo, and the last to be penned by Ferri before his replacement with Fabrice Caro the following year.
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