Comics have long been a matter of artists and artists only. The screenwriting profession did not exist before René Goscinny and a few others (Jean-Michel Charlier, Jacques Lob, Greg, Yvan Delporte, etc.) successfully demonstrated that graphic writing could be perfectly dissociated. The “pure” screenwriter, Pierre Christin, was one of the greatest of the 9my art. Both for the profusion of his work – around a hundred works published in fifty years of career – and for the scope of his work of constantly renewed modernity, on the borders of the political, the social, the fantastic or even the intimate. He who was also a novelist, journalist, professor, academic and unrepentant traveler died on Thursday, October 3 in Paris at the age of 86.
Free spirit and scholar, Pierre Christin was endowed with a rare foresight that allowed him to anticipate, through fiction, two important events in the history of the 20th century.my century: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, in The city of moving waters (1970), first volume of the science fiction series. Valerian, created with Jean-Claude Mézières; and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, in hunting group (1983), directed with Enki Bilal. To classify him in the anti-communist camp would be to forget that he attacked liberalism with such ardor in Valerian. The space opera subgenre was also very useful for the screenwriter, allowing him to explore many unused themes, such as ecology or globalization.
Born on July 27, 1938 in Saint-Mandé (then in the Seine department), Pierre Christin owes his intellectual and artistic career to public school: “I am a survivor of the old popular supplementary course courses », he liked to say. The son of a hairdresser and a manicurist, he entered the Lycée Turgot in Paris, before continuing his studies at Sciences-Po and then at the Sorbonne, where he earned a doctorate in comparative literature, defending a thesis titled “Le fait-miscelaire,literature.” . of the poor.” Along with piano-jazz, literature is his true passion. His favorite authors are Alexandre Dumas, Chester Himes, Tom Wolfe but also Edgar P. Jacobs, the creator of Blake & Mortimer. He writes a little “pieces of novels and poems to seduce girls”without thinking that comics will become his main field of expression.
an american trip
Chance will take you there. Fascinated by the United States, the young graduate embarked on a journey through the American West as visiting professor in 1965, and obtained a position as professor of contemporary French literature at the University of Salt Lake City (Utah). The world wasn’t big enough to get away from his friends, so he accidentally found Jean-Claude Mézières, a childhood friend whom he met during the bombings of World War II, in the shelter of a basement.
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