Philippe Delaby

Philippe Delaby was born in 1961 in Tournai as an only child. His passion for drawing began at the age of eight, when his father gave him his first comic book; at fourteen, he enrolled in his city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Fascinated by Ingres and the Flemish masters, he studied drawing and oil painting. This classical training, in a Belgium where comic strips were booming, immediately placed him among the ranks of realist artists: Cuvelier (creator of Corentin) and Jacques Martin (creator of Alix), who served as his academic role models. At eighteen, after winning a drawing contest, Delaby submitted his work to Le Journal de Tintin; where he honed his craft by creating illustrations and short stories based on scripts by Yves Duval and Jean-Luc Vernal. His first four-page story featured gladiators… 

His penchant for history never left him: he created an album on the quest for the Holy Grail with Duval, another on the Crusades, and then, in 1993, began the Nordic series Bran. His meeting with Jean Dufaux marked a turning point in his career: this unparalleled storyteller crafted a series tailored specifically for him, Murena (1997), a peplum foreshadowing Gladiator, which brought a breath of fresh air to a genre that had remained stagnant since Alix. The success was overwhelming: in 2011, Murena received the Historical Comic Book Award at the BdBOUM festival in Blois. 

Having become a best-selling author who consistently delivered albums of astonishing quality, Delaby accepted—in an effort to diversify—Dufaux’s proposal to take over La Complainte des landes perdues (Lament for the Lost Moors) after Grzegorz Rosiński, which he illustrated in direct color from 2004 to 2014. Both men shared the same dexterity in the techniques of “grand painting.” He was working on his fourth Complainte when a heart attack took his life on January 28, 2014, at the age of 53, leaving his career cut short in its prime. Since 2025, the Tournai les Bulles festival has awarded the Philippe Delaby Prize in his honor to recognize a realist comic artist.