Jean Giraud
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Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (8 May 1938 – 10 March 2012) was a French comics artist, working in the French tradition of bandes dessinées. Giraud earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Mœbius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee and Jack Lang among other notables, he was one of the few francophone comic strip artists to receive international acclaim.
Among his most famous creation was the Western comic series "Blueberry" which he cocreated with Jean-Michel Charlier, one of the first Western anti-heroes to appear in comics. Under the pseudonym Moebius he created a wide range of science fiction and and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative and surreal almost abstract style, the most famous of which are Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius, and the The Incal. Blueberry was adapted for the screen in 2004, and in 1997 Moebius and cocreator Alejandro Jodorowsky sued Luc Besson for using the Incal as inspiration for his movie The Fifth Element, a lawsuit which they lost.
Moebius contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science fiction and fantasy films, including Alien, Willow, and Tron (1982).
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Life
Jean Giraud was born in Nogent-sur-Marne, in the suburbs of Paris, in 1938. At age 16, he began his only technical training at the Arts Appliqués. When he was three yeas old his parents divorced and he was raised mainly by his grandparents. The rupture beetween the mother and father, the city and country creating a lasting trauma that he explained was at the heart of his choice of separate pen-names. Through his career he experimented with drugs and various New Age type philosophies, such as Guy-Claude Burger's instinctotherapy, which influenced his creation of the comic book "Edena".
Style
His working methods were various and adaptable ranging from etchings, white and black illustrations, to work in colour of the ligne claire genre and water colours. Giraud's solo Blueberry works were sometimes criticized by fans of the series because the artist dramatically changed the tone of the series as well as the graphic style. However, Blueberry's early success was also due to Giraud's innovations as he did not content himself with following earlier styles, an important aspect of his development as an artist.
To distinguish between work by Giraud and Moebius, Giraud used a brush for his own work and a pen when he signed his work as Moebius. Giraud drew very quickly.
His style has been compared to the Nouveaux réalistes, exemplified in his turn from the bowdlerized realism of Hergé's Tin Tin towards a grittier style depicting sex, violence and moral bankruptcy.
Career
Western comics
At 18, Giraud was drawing his own comic strip, "Frank et Jeremie" for the magazine Far West. In 1961, Giraud became an apprentice of Jijé, one of the leading comic artists in Europe of the time, and collaborated on an album of Jerry Spring. In 1962 Giraud and writer Jean-Michel Charlier started the comic strip Fort Navajo for Pilote. It was a great hit and continued uninterrupted until 1974.
The Lieutenant Blueberry character, whose facial features were based on those of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, was created by Giraud and Charlier for Fort Navajo, and quickly became its most popular character. His adventures as told in the spin-off Western serial Blueberry, are possibly Giraud's best known work in his native France before his later collaborations with Alejandro Jodorowsky. The early Blueberry comics used a simple line drawing style, and standard Western themes and imagery, but gradually Giraud developed a darker and grittier style. Especially after censorship laws were loosened in 1968 the strip became more explicitly adult, and also adopted a wider range of thematics. Giraud left the series in 1973 leaving the artwork to Colin Wilson, and late Michel Blanc-Dumont.
When Charlier, Giraud's colaborator on Blueberry died in 1989, Giraud assumed responsibility for the scripting of the series.
Science fiction and fantasy comics
The Moebius pseudonym, which Giraud came to use for his science fiction and fantasy work, was born in 1963. In a satire magazine called Hara-Kiri, Moebius did 21 strips in 1963–64 and then disappeared for almost a decade.
In 1975 he revived the Moebius pseudonym and with Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Philippe Druillet, and Bernard Farkas, he became one of the founding members of the comics art group "Les Humanoides Associes" with whom he started the magazine Métal Hurlant, the magazine known in the English speaking world as "Heavy Metal" . Moebius' famous serial The Airtight Garage and his groundbreaking Arzach both began in Métal Hurlant.
Arzach, first published in Metal hurlant is a wordless comic, created in a conscious attempt to breathe new life into the comic genre which at the time was dominated by American superhero comics. It tracks the journey of the title character flying on the back of his pterodactyl through a fantastic world mixing medieval fantasy with futurism. Unlike most science fiction comics it has no captions, no speech ballons and no written sound effects. It has been argued that the wordlessness provides the strip with a sense of timelessness, setting up Arzach's journey as a quest for eternal, universal truths.
In 1981 he started his famous L'Incal series in collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Jean Giraud drew the first of the two-part last volume of the XIII series titled La Version Irlandaise (The Irish Version) from a script by Jean Van Hamme, to accompany the second part by the regular team Jean Van Hamme–William Vance, Le dernier round (The Last Round). Both parts were published on the same date (13 November 2007).
Marvel comics
A two-issue Silver Surfer miniseries (later collected as Silver Surfer: Parable), scripted by Lee and drawn by Moebius, was published through Marvel's Epic Comics imprint in 1988 and 1989. Because of inconsistencies with other stories, it has been argued that these stories actually feature an alternate Silver Surfer from a parallel Earth. This miniseries won the Eisner Award for best finite/limited series in 1989.
Films
Moebius contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science fiction films, including Alien by Ridley Scott, Tron by Disney, The Fifth Element by Luc Besson, and for Jodorowsky's planned adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, which was however abandoned in pre-production.
In 1982 he collaborated with director René Laloux to create the science fiction feature-length animated movie Les Maîtres du temps (released in English as Time Masters) based on a novel by Stefan Wul.
In 1991 his graphic novel Cauchemar Blanc was cinematized by Matthieu Kassowitz. The Blueberry series was adapted for the screen in 2004, by Jan Kounen as Blueberry: L'expérience secrète.
Exhibitions
From December 2004 to March 2005, his work was exhibited with that of Hayao Miyazaki at La Monnaie in Paris.
Stamps
Giraud's prestige in France – where comics are held in high artistic regard – is enormous; In 1988 Moebius was chosen, among 11 other winners of the prestigious Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival, to illustrate a postage stamp set issued on the theme of communication. Under the names Giraud and Gir, he also wrote numerous comics for other comic artists like Auclair and Tardi.
Autobiography
He has also published "Inside Moebius", a illustrated autobiography from 2000 to 2010. Inside Moebius (its title is in English though the books are in French), is six hardcover volumes totaling 700 pages. In these books he appears in cartoon form as both creator and protagonist, trapped within the story alongside his younger self and several longtime characters such as Blueberry, Arzak (the latest re-spelling of the Arzach character's name), Major Grubert (from The Airtight Garage), and others. Moebius subsequently decided to revive the Arzak character in an elaborate new adventure series, the first volume of which, Arzak L'Arpenteur, appeared in 2010. He also began new works in the Airtight Garage series with a volume entitled Le Chasseur Deprime.
Death
Giraud died of cancer on March 10, 2012 at age 73 in Paris.
Influence and legacy
Many artists around the world have cited Giraud as an influence on their work. Manga author and anime filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has said:
Through Arzach, which dates from 1975 I believe. I only met it in 1980, and it was a big shock. Not only for me. All manga authors were shaken by this work. Unfortunately when I discovered it, I already had a consolidated style. So I couldn't use his influence to enrich my drawing. Though, even today, I think he has an awesome sense of space. I directed Nausicaä under Moebius' influence.
Miyazaki and Giraud were longtime friends. Giraud named his daughter after Nausicaä from Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Pioneering cyberpunk author William Gibson said of Giraud's work The Long Tomorrow:
So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk'. Those French guys, they got their end in early.
The Long Tomorrow also came to the attention of Ridley Scott and was a key visual reference for Blade Runner.
Bibliography
Those works for which English translations have been published are noted as such. Their respective pages describe this further.
As Jean Giraud
- Blueberry (29 volumes, English translation, 1965 - ), artist (all vol), writer vol 25-29
- Jim Cutlass (7 volumes, 1979–1999), artist vol. 1, writer vol 2-7
- XIII (volume 18, La Version irlandaise in 2007), artist
- Marshall Blueberry (3 volumes, 2000), writer
- Le Cristal Majeur (3 volumes, 1986–1990), writer (artist: Bati), Paris: Dargaud
As Moebius
- Le Bandard fou (English translation, 1975), writer and artist
- Arzach (English translation, 1976), writer and artist
- The Long Tomorrow (Originally in English, 1976), artist
- L'Homme est-il bon? (English translation, 1977), writer and artist
- Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, English translation, 1976–1980), writer and artist
- Les Yeux du Chat (1978), artist
- Tueur de monde (1979), writer and artist
- l'Incal (The Incal, 6 volumes, English translation, 1981–1988), artist
- Les Maîtres du temps (1982), artist
- Venise céleste (1984), writer and artist
- Le Monde d'Edena (1985–2001), writer and artist
- Altor (7 volumes, 1986 - ), writer
- Silver Surfer: Parable (Originally in English, 1988–1989), artist
- Escale sur Pharagonescia (1989), writer and artist
- Les Vacances du Major (1992), writer and artist
- Le Coeur couronné (The Crowned Heart, English translation, 1992), artist
- Les Histoires de Monsieur Mouche (1994), artist
- Griffes d'Ange (1994), artist
- Little Nemo (1994), writer
- Ballades (1 volume, 1995), artist
- Après l'Incal (2000 - ), artist
- Icare (2005), writer
- Halo Graphic Novel (Originally in English, 2006), artist
- Inside Moebius (2000–2010), writer and artist
- Arzak L'Arpenteur (2010), writer and artist
Collected editions
The English-language versions of many of Moebius's comics have been collected into various editions, beginning with a series of trade paperbacks from Marvel Comics' Epic imprint in the late 1980s and early 1990s:
The Collected Fantasies of Jean Giraud (1987–1994):
- Moebius 0 - The Horny Goof & Other Underground Stories (72 pages, Dark Horse, 1990, ISBN 1878574167)
- Moebius ½ - The Early Moebius & Other Humorous Stories (Graphitti Designs, 1992, ISBN 0936211288)
- Moebius 1 - Upon A Star (72 pages, Marvel/Epic, 1987, ISBN 0871352788)
- Moebius 2 - Arzach & Other Fantasy Stories (72 pages, Titan, ISBN 1852860456, Marvel/Epic, 1987)
- Moebius 3 - The Airtight Garage (120 pages, Titan, ISBN 1852860464, Marvel/Epic, 1987)
- Moebius 4 - The Long Tomorrow & Other Science Fiction Stories (70 pages, Marvel/Epic, 1987, ISBN 0871352818)
- Moebius 5 - The Gardens of Aedena (72 pages, Titan, ISBN 1852860472, Marvel/Epic, 1988, ISBN 0871352826)
- Moebius 6 - Pharagonesia & Other Strange Stories (72 pages, Titan, ISBN 1852860480, Marvel/Epic, 1988)
- Moebius 7 - The Goddess (88 pages, Marvel/Epic, 1990, ISBN 0871357143)
- Moebius 8 - Mississippi River (64 pages, Marvel/Epic, 1991, ISBN 0871357151)
- Moebius 9 - Stel (Marvel/Epic, 1994)
Most of these volumes were later reissued by Graphitti Designs in assorted combinations, as a series of signed and numbered hardcover limited editions.
In 2010 and 2011, the publisher Humanoids (in the U.S.) began releasing new editions of Moebius works, starting with three of Moebius's past collaborations with Alexandro Jodorowsky: The Incal (original series complete in one volume), Madwoman of the Sacred Heart (all three parts complete in one volume), and The Eyes of the Cat.
Filmography
- Alien (1979)
- The Time Masters (1982)
- Tron (1982)
- Masters of the Universe (1987)
- Willow (1988)
- The Abyss (1989)
- Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
- The Fifth Element (1997) - The production design for the film was developed by French comics creators Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Jean-Claude Mézières and is detailed in a DVD/Blu-ray special feature.
- The Jodorowsky Constellation (1994) - He talks about his collaboration with Alexandro Jodorowsky on the mega film project Dune and on the comic strip the Incal. During the psycho-genealogical session that concludes the film, he also impersonates the father of the filmmaker Louis Mouchet.
- Mister Gir & Mike S. Blueberry (1999) - A documentary portrait by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew produced by the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême, France. Giraud does numerous sketches and watercolors of his most famous creation, Blueberry, travels to Saint Malo for the celebrated comic-book festival, visits his Paris editor Dargaud, and in the film's last sequence, does a spontaneous life-size portrait in real time of Geronimo on a huge sheet of glass using a felt-tipped pen.
- Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002) - Giraud conceived the poster for the documentary's 2003 North American release and appears in the DVD bonus extras of the French version.
- Blueberry (2004) - On the DVD extras Giraud talks about the comic, the film etc., dressed in period costume, apparently having done a cameo role in the film.
- Thru the Moebius Strip (2005)
- Giraud worked on Alejandro Jodorowsky's film adaptation of Dune which was never completed.
- Giraud's artwork for the Dan O'Bannon short story comic "The Long Tomorrow" was a key visual reference for Blade Runner.
- Giraud represented the jury of the Paris Storyboard Contest 2005 (Concours SOPADIN - Société Parisienne des Images Nouvelles) and awarded the two young artists and filmmakers "K-Michel Parandi" (Kay Parandi) & "Jean François Guillon" for their work on the futuristic and experimental film "Minuit 14". Jean Giraud was assisted on this by the notorious French director "Gerard Krawczyk" (Taxi, Fanfan la tulipe).
- George Lucas used one of Giraud's designs for the Imperial Probe Droid in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas's later Star Wars films also share many visual characteristics with Giraud's work, particularly the depiction of the city-planet Coruscant.
- Giraud also shared "Story by" credit on the animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.
- Strange frame (2009)
- Métamoebius (2010) - Documentary portrait of Giraud-Moebius directed by Damian Pettigrew and co-written by Jean Giraud for the 2010 retrospective held at the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art in Paris.
Video games
- Fade to Black cover art (1995)
- Panzer Dragoon (1995)
- Pilgrim: Faith as a Weapon (1998)
- An arcade and bar based on Giraud's work, called The Airtight Garage, was one of the original main attractions at the Metreon in San Francisco when the complex opened in 1999. It included three original games: Quaternia, a first-person shooter networked between terminals and based on the concept of "junctors" from Major Fatal and The Airtight Garage; a virtual reality bumper cars game about mining asteroids; and Hyperbowl, an obstacle course bowling game incorporating very little overtly Moebius imagery. The arcade was closed and reopened as "Portal One", retaining much of the Moebius-based decor and Hyperbowl but eliminating the other originals in favor of more common arcade games.
Awards
- 1973: Shazam Award, Best Foreign Comic Series, for Lieutenant Blueberry
- 1975: Yellow Kid Award, Lucca, Italy, Best Foreign Artist
- 1977: Angoulême International Comics Festival Best French Artist
- 1979: Adamson Award, for Lieutenant Blueberry etc.
- 1980: Yellow Kid Award, Lucca, Italy, Best Foreign Author
- 1980: Grand Prix de la Science Fiction Française, Special Prize, for Major Fatal
- 1981: Angoulême International Comics Festival Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême
- 1985: Angoulême International Comics Festival Grand Prix for the graphic arts
- 1986: Inkpot Award
- 1988: Harvey Award, Best American Edition of Foreign Material, for Moebius album series
- 1989: Eisner Award, Best Finite Series, for Silver Surfer
- 1989: Harvey Award, Best American Edition of Foreign Material, for Incal
- 1991: Eisner Award, Best Single Issue, for Concrete
- 1991: Harvey Award, Best American Edition of Foreign Material, for Lieutenant Blueberry
- 1997: Designated finalist for induction into the Harvey Award Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1989, inducted in 1997
- 1997: World Fantasy Award: Artist category
- 1998: Included in the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame
- 2000: Max & Moritz Prizes, Special Prize for outstanding life's work
- 2001: Haxtur Award Best Long Comic Strip, for The Crowned Heart
See also