François Schuiten - Biography

Born in Brussels on 26 April 1956, François Schuiten developed a passion for comics from an early age. His father, Robert Schuiten, a well-known architect, cultivated his taste for the fine arts, and taught him drawing in the hope of seeing him become an architect himself.

At the age of 16, he published his first story, entitled Mutation (a short story drawn entirely in bic), in the Belgian edition of the newspaper Pilote. He then met Claude Renard at the bande dessinée workshop during his postgraduate studies at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels, with whom he produced 2 albums for Les Humanoïdes Associés under the title Métamorphoses (reissued in 2007 by Casterman): Aux Médianes de Cymbiola and Le Rail. In 1977 he published his first stories, Les Terres Creuses, in collaboration with his brother (also an architect), Luc Schuiten, in the magazine Métal Hurlant. This was followed by a series of 3 albums published by Les Humanoïdes Associés: Carapaces, Zara (initially called La Terre creuse) and Nogegon. Alongside this first series, he worked with his childhood friend Benoît Peeters on the series Les Cités Obscures. Their first story, Les Murailles de Samaris, was published in the monthly magazine (À Suivre) in 1983. Around twenty albums followed, most of them published by Casterman. The Cités Obscures series, which has now been translated into dozen of languages, has been crowned with success and won numerous awards. It is still regarded as one of the major series of recent decades. The album La Fièvre d'Urbicande won the Best Album prize at the Angoulême Festival in 1985. In 2002, rewarded for all his work, François Schuiten won the highest accolade for any cartoonist, the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême.

In addition to his work as a comic strip artist, François Schuiten fights for the conservation of Belgium's cultural and architectural heritage. Together with Benoît Peeters and the Commune of Schaerbeek, he is renovating Victor Horta's first Art Nouveau house in Brussels, La Maison Autrique. Alongside this, Schuiten also does a great deal of illustration (a dozen stamps for the Belgian Post Office, countless posters, serigraphs, lithographs and other illustrations (as you can discover on this website), film and set design. He has collaborated on the graphic design of several films, including Taxandria by Raoul Servais, and co-authored one of the first computer-generated images animated series, Les Quarxs by Maurice Benayoun. In conjunction with the Obscure Cities series, he co-wrote two docu-dramas with Benoît Peeters: Le Dossier B. (1995, Les Impressions Nouvelles) and L'Affaire Desombres (2002, Casterman). He is also very active in the field of scenography, having designed (among other things) the exhibition Le Musée des Ombres in Angoulème in 1990, the Arts et Métiers metro station in Paris and the Porte de Hal metro station in Brussels, as well as several pavilions for World Fairs: the Luxembourg pavilion in Seville, the Utopia theme park in Hanover - which welcomed five million visitors - and the Belgian pavilion at the World Fair in Aichi (Japan). He has also designed sets for various opera and dance productions, including Rossini's opera La Cenerentola, presented at La Monnaie in Brussels and the Opéra de Lyon. He has taken part in the graphic design of various films, including Jaco Vandormael's Mister Nobody. At the same time, for around ten years he has been involved in the design and scenography of the new Train World museum in Schaerbeek (Brussels), an exciting project that is particularly close to his heart. At the end of 2016, the Machines à dessiner exhibition opened at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris, the fruit of a collaboration with his long-time scriptwriter, Benoît Peeters. Built around a confrontation between the scientific and technical collections of the Musée des arts et métiers and a wide selection of graphic works, this exhibition invites visitors to discover the singular imagination of the two partners. During the summer of 2017, the town of Cherbourg in France, as part of the 9th Art Biennial, is paying tribute to one of the founding fathers of comics, Winsor McCay. For the occasion, the Schuiten/Peeters duo designed and staged the exhibition paying tribute to him, Winsor McCay, from Little Nemo to Lustitania. Once again, the exhibition was a great success.

François Schuiten is currently working on a new album of the adventures of Blake and Mortimer for Dargaud, but on the fringes of the series. A special edition in a style completely different from that of Edgar P. Jacobs, one of his great masters. A Blake and Mortimer à la Schuiten, with the help of Thomas Gunzig on the script (and to a lesser extent Jaco Van Dormael) and the Durieux brothers for their graphic contribution and colouring. Alongside this project, François Schuiten is part of the ScanPyramids mission led by engineer Mehdi Tayoubi. This is a scientific expedition to Egypt where archaeologists and other specialists descend to the centre of Khéops to unravel the mystery of the largest of the pyramids, the only vestige of the Seven Wonders of the World.