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The death has been announced of one of the greats of the contemprary B.D. scene, André Juillard.

Born in Paris in 1948, he grew up in the Auvergne, where he became a life-long devotee of clear-line comics, as a reader of Tintin magazine, in which he followed stories by the likes of Hergé, Jacobs and Bob De Moor.
After studying at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (an art school in Paris), he took drawing lessons from Jean-Claude Mézières (Valérian) and Jean Giraud, better known under his pen-names of Mœbius (The Incal) or Gir (Blueberry).

Working with several different writers, he began to build up a portfolio of work which used his realistic style and knowledge of history to great effect. For example, between 1983 and 1991, there were seven volumes of Patrick Cothias' Les 7 Vies de l'Épervier, featuring Ariane de Troïl, a heroine living in the Auvergne at the end of the reign of Henry IV of France.

This series had origially been a spin-off from the team's earlier Masquerouge adventures, and began as a prequel to those stories; however, its last volume is set after the Masquerouge books, and the series (including many further stories written by Cothias and drawn by others) has become a 55 volume saga, under the Les Sept Vies de l'Épervier banner.

In addition, in collaboration with Hergé's old colleague Jacques Martin, he created Arno, an adventure hero in Napoleonic France, producing three volumes between 1983 and 1987 (the series was later revived, but with art by Jacques Denoël rather than Juillard).

Recognised as a prodigous modern talent, but with a respect for the "golden age of B.D., he had been offered the opportunity to work on the completion of Jacob's unfinished Blake & Mortimer story The 3 Formulæ of Professor Sato by the publisher Dargaud, an approach which he declined, feeling that he wasn't ready for the responsibility of working on characters he had loved since childhood.

However, by 2000, with his own work now well established - with portfolios, posters and other illustrative work joining his ever-growing list of albums - and following the first of the "new" B&M albums by other hands (1996's The Francis Blake Affair by Jean Van Hamme & Ted Benoît), he joined with writer Yves Sente on The Voronov Plot, which proved to be a successful and popular teaming, and led to further entries in the series: The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent (two volumes, 2003 and 2004); The Gondwana Shrine (2008); The Oath of the Five Lords (2012); Plutarch's Staff (2015); The Testament of William S. (2016). A further volume, provisionally titled Cornish Adventures was anounced with a possible 2023 publication date, but nothing has come of this as yet, and today's news may mean that he had not had time to complete it.

Our sympathies and condolences go to his family, friends and colleagues.