François Bourgeon
| François Bourgeon | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
July 5, 1945 Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Area(s) | artist, writer, colourist |
| Pseudonym(s) | Bourgeon |
|
Notable works
|
Les Passagers du vent Les Compagnons du crépuscule Le Cycle de Cyann |
| Awards | full list |
François Bourgeon (born July 5, 1945, Paris) is a French comics artist, author of several noted European comic books.
Bourgeon was originally educated as a master stained glass artist, but difficulties in finding employment and a passion for drawing altered his course onto a different career. Getting illustrations published in magazines from 1971 eventually led him to pursue graphic storytelling and to develop his craft over the next few years. When the Les passagers du vent (The Passengers of the Wind) series was serialised in Circus magazine in 1979, it became recognised as one of the most important European comic series of its era. His graphic novels have ranged from nautical and medieval historical fiction to science fiction, and characteristically, within settings of violence and sexuality, epic stories revolve around strong female characters. Isa, Mariotte and Cyann are the heroines of each their series, The Passagers of the Wind, The Twilight Companions and The Cyann Saga, respectively. Bourgeon is noted as a thorough researcher and his drawings, from 17th-century ships to 14th-century clothing, have a reputation for historical accuracy. For example, when working on The Passengers of the Wind, he did a vast amount of background reading, consulted academic specialists and visited the Maritime Museum in Nantes. For this series he also made scale models both of colonial architectural structures and one of the ships on which the main characters sail, in order to ensure that the dimensions and the interior layouts were correct. He lives in Cornouaille in Brittany.
When Bourgeon's usual editor since 1983, the family-owned company Casterman, was bought by the large corporation Flammarion, problems arose. Bourgeon and Lacroix claimed that Flammarion had altered the sales numbers to slow down royalty payments to the authors, and then committed other irregularities. The authors took Flammarion to court in 1999. Flammarion countersued separately, charging the authors over failure to produce a new album of the Cyann series in less than three years. The contract between the authors and Casterman had never specified a fixed date or time period for producing any album, but despite this, on October 30, 2001, a court decided in favor of Flammarion and ordered the authors to produce an album (the third of the series), with a fine of €1000 per each day's delay. On April 27, 2004 an appeals court finally overturned the judgment of the previous court. In the meantime these litigations had become a "cause célèbre" in France, because of the intellectual freedom questions and copyright issues they raised in literary circles. In the end, the authors got their liberty and their rights and the third album of the cycle finally came out in 2005, eight years after the previous one, through a different publishing house, Vents d'Ouest.
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