Jean-Michel Charlier

Jean-Michel Charlier (30 October 1924 – 10 July 1989) was a Belgian comics writer. He was a co-founder of the famed Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote. Charlier was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1924. In 1945 he got a job as a draughtsman in Brussels with World Press, the syndicate of Georges Troisfontaines, which worked mainly for Spirou magazine.

The following year he and artist Victor Hubinon created the four-page comic strip L'Agonie du Bismarck. Charlier wrote the script and also drew the ships and airplanes. In 1947, Charlier and Hubinon began the long-running air-adventure comic strip Buck Danny. After a few years, Charlier stopped all work on the drawings and concentrated only on the scenarios, on the advice of Jijé, then the senior artist at Spirou.

Unable to support himself writing comic scripts at a time when Dupuis concentrated almost solely on the magazine and albums were few and far between, Charlier qualified for a pilots license in 1949 and briefly flew for the airline SABENA. However the following year Charlier returned to comic strips, collaborating with Hubinon once again to create Tiger Joe for La Libre Junior, the weekly comics supplement to the journal La Libre Belgique.

Charlier also continued to supply scripts for Spirou magazine, collaborating with Eddy Paape on the strip Valhardi and, in 1955, with future Asterix artist Albert Uderzo on the comic strip Belloy. Together with Hubinon, he also created some biographical comics like Jean Mermoz and Surcouf. Other long-running series he started for Spirou in the early 1950s were La Patrouille des Castors for Mitacq, and in 1951 Les Vraies Histoires de l'Oncle Paul (Uncle Paul's true stories), a weekly comic of four pages telling a true story.

The latter series was continued from 1954 on by Octave Joly, and was a place where many young talents published their first comics, including Jean Graton, René Follet and Hermann Huppen. Charlier, Hubinon, Uderzo, and comic-strip writer René Goscinny founded the comics agency Edifrance and the magazine Pistolin in 1955, and the influential magazine Pilote in 1959.

Charlier was editor-in-chief and also wrote two stories for the first issue: Redbeard with Hubinon and Tanguy and Laverdure with Uderzo – these latter two characters would later get their own TV series as well: Les Chevaliers du Ciel, featuring Tanguy and Laverdure, was made by ORTF between 1967 and 1969, an English-dubbed version of the show being released under the title The Aeronauts.

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