Willy Lambil

Born Willy Lambillotte in 1936, he joined the art department at Dupuis Publishing in 1952, at the age of just 16. His very first assignment was simply to replace the French lettering in Stanley with its Flemish version—a humble start to a career that would later become a textbook example of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition.

In 1959, he created the series Sandy (Sandy and Hoppy), drawn in a realistic style, for which he would produce twenty-five major episodes. The decisive turning point occurred in 1972: following the death of artist Louis Salvérius (known as Salvé), he took over Les Tuniques Bleues, a series launched in 1968 by Salvérius and the young writer Raoul Cauvin. He thus found himself in charge of the graphic destiny of Blutch and Chesterfield, set in a world – the American Civil War - about which he knew almost nothing, forcing him to conduct meticulous research. The series' success led him to abandon Sandy (Sandy and Hoppy). At the same time, in 1973, he collaborated with Cauvin in Spirou’s “Carte Blanche” column to create a parodic and quasi-autobiographical character: Pauvre Lampil, an artist struggling with the torments of the creative process. The series Pauvre Lampil (Poor Lampil) ended in 1995 after seven albums, overshadowed by the growing demand for new episodes of Les Tuniques Bleues (The Bluecoats). 

His career was marked by rare productivity and loyalty: for a long time one of the weekly magazine’s most prolific artists, he produced nearly a hundred pages a year. In terms of awards, he received the Prix Géant de la BD in 2004 and the Grand Prix Saint-Michel in 2006. In total, he enjoyed more than 50 years of success and produced 20 million comic books translated into 15 languages. The recent handoff of the writing duties has reshuffled the deck: Cauvin wrote the first 64 volumes before stepping down in 2020, with the reins then passing to José Luis Munuera and subsequently to the BeKa duo. Despite this transition, Lambil picked up his pencil again and, in 2025, illustrated the 68th installment, written by Fred Neidhardt, continuing the same year with the 69th installment, Lincoln dans la ligne de mire (Lincoln in the Crosshairs) —at nearly 90 years old.