Alain Corbel

Alain Corbel was born in Brittany, France, in 1965. He studied at the St. Lukas School of Fine Arts (comic strip department) in Brussels, where he met Eric Lambé. They have worked together since 1990 and produced Mokka and Pelure Amère, two modern comic strip magazines that have influenced many comic strip artists and publishers such as Amok and Fréon. Between 1996 and 1997 he was art director of the children's section of the Breton weekly newspaper, Nekepell. He has lived in Lisbon, Portugal, since 1997, where he works as a comic artist, illustrator and storywriter for publishers, magazines and newspapers. He has always chosen to live in places for their geographic and poetic qualities. Since 2000, he has been going regularly to Guinea Bissau and São Tomé where he organizes illustration and writing workshops in community-run schools. Between 2001 and 2004, he traveled around the former Portuguese colonies (Cape Verde Islands, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and Principe, Angola and Mozambique) with his good friend Pedro Rosa Mendes, a well-known portuguese writer. The project, which was promoted by an NGO, is about the reality of life for many communities and it has been made into a book : Ilhas de fogo. In 2004, they visited the young country, East Timor, for the same publisher. He looks on his work as an illustrator as a deep personal trip and approaches each book with a special graphic language. Flexibility and freedom in style and technique are very important for him. He has 2 children: a fourteen-years old daughter and a baby boy. In 2002 he was awarded the best Portuguese illustrator for the book Contos de Macau (Tales from Macao) written by Alice Vieira published by Caminho.

Source : auteur