Paul Gillon

Born on May 11, 1926, in Paris, Paul Gillon grew up in a single-parent household, raised by his mother—a secretary—alongside his brother and sister. He trained at the École des arts graphiques de Paris to become an illustrator, in postwar France where press illustration was still a natural career path for young artists. Starting at the age of fourteen, he earned a living by illustrating sheet music for music-hall songs for the publisher Raoul Breton, before observing an caricaturing the actors he admired for Samedi-Soir, Ce Soir, and Gavroche—iconic newspapers of the French popular press in the 1940s and 1950s. It was in this context that, beginning in 1947, he became one of the pillars of the weekly Vaillant, a publication born out of the Resistance press movement. This ideological foundation explains the nature of several of his early major series: Fils de Chine (Son of China), a biography of Mao Zedong co-written with Roger Lécureux between 1950 and 1953, and L'Histoire du socialisme en France (The History of Socialism in France). These works demonstrate Gillon’s versatility—he was capable of blending exotic themes like Lynx Blanc (White Lynx) and Wango, pirate adventures like Capitaine Cormoran (Captain Cormoran), with Jean Ollivier, and literary adaptations such as Moby Dick. 

In the 1960s, as the French illustrated press experienced a golden age fueled by competition among major media groups, Gillon became one of the most sought-after comic artists in Paris: Paul Winkler (Le Journal de Mickey), Daniel Filipacchi, and Pierre Lazareff (France-Soir) all vied for his services. In particular, from 1959 to 1972, he drew the daily comic strip 13, rue de l’Espoir, a graphic soap opera that accompanied the rise of popular comic strips in the general-interest press. In 1968, he created his own series, Jérémie, a maritime adventure published in Vaillant (which had since become Pif Gadget), one of the biggest hits in the French youth press, which earned him the Phénix Prize in 1972. 

In the 1970s, Paul Gillon became a key figure in the revival of comic art, driven by a generation of creators seeking graphic and narrative freedom, far from the constraints of traditional children’s publications. Together with Jean-Claude Forest, creator of Barbarella, he conceived Les Naufragés du temps (The Shipwrecked of Time), a science-fiction space opera whose development began in 1964 and spanned ten years, appearing first in Chouchou and France-Soir before taking over the pages of Métal Hurlant in 1977. In 1974, he became one of the co-founders of the publishing house Les Humanoïdes Associés, alongside Philippe Druillet, Mœbius, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and Bernard Farkas—a venture that laid the lasting foundation for this new market of comic art for adults. This commitment was recognized in 1982 with the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême. 

In the 1980s, he ventured more directly into the erotic genre with La Survivante (The Survivor, 1985–1991), published in L’Écho des savanes, while continuing to produce work addressing serious topics: the Holocaust in Au nom de tous les miens (For Those I Loved) (which won the RTL Grand Prix in 1986), and deportation to Buchenwald in L’Ordre de Cicéron (The Order of Cicero). This latter series, which began in 2004 based on a script by the attorney Richard Malka, brought his career to a close with a legal theme that was new to him. Paul Gillon died on May 21, 2011, in Amiens, leaving behind a body of work that spans nearly the entire history of postwar French comic art.