Yves Chaland

Yves Chaland was born in Lyon on 3 April 1957 to Jean-Marie Chaland and Marie-Thérèse Chapolard. Chaland published his first strips in the fanzine Biblipop when he was 17. During his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne, he created his own fanzine, L'Unité de Valeur, in 1976, with Luc Cornillon. In 1978, they met writer/editor Jean-Pierre Dionnet who hired them for his comics magazines Métal Hurlant and Ah Nana. These pastiches of 50s comics have been collected in the album Captivant. In September 1979 he married designer Isabelle Beaumenay-Joannet. He then created the characters of Bob Fish, Adolphus Claar, Freddy Lombard, and Le Jeune Albert, a scamp character living in the Marolles, a working-class area of Brussels. Yves Chaland, was approached to draw an adventure of Spirou et Fantasio, appearinging in half-page installments of the weekly Spirou magazine. Done in a retro 50s style similar to his influences Jijé and André Franquin, both former artists on the Spirou feature. The unfinished story has been collected in the album Spirou et Fantasio – Hors Série, No. 4 (Dupuis, 2003). He also did many advertising illustration commissions in his crisp, clean, "retro-modern" cartoon style. Chaland died on 18 July 1990, following a car wreck, at the age of 33.