The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

There are nicer ways of starting the new year than by announcing the death of yet another mainstay of European comics.  As the Flemish comic blog Strip Turnhout announced on Sunday, cartoonist Tibet passed away during the night of Saturday, January 2nd, at the age of 78.

(Tibet at the 1989 Angouleme Festival, pic borrowed from Wikipedia)

Born a French citizen, named Gilbert Gascard, Tibet lived in Belgium for most of his life and was one of the central creators in the fabled “stable” of Tintin Magazine.  He also served as artistic director for the Lombard publishing house for a long time.

Tibet was born and raised in Marseilles, but somehow ended up in Brussels, together with his sick mother.  He was a born cartoonist, and was only 13 when he knocked on the doors of the Studios Hergé to show his work to the master.  After a brief passage at the Brussels branch of the Walt Disney Studios, Tibet joined the team of the Tintin magazine and becomes a very loyal, and much loved colleague.  He engaged in very close and intimate friendships with colleagues like Jean Graton, Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo – for some reason Frenchmen all, who for several reasons had ended up doing comics in Belgium, and all of whom would conquer the world with titles like “Chick Bill”, “Ric Hochet”, “Michel Vaillant” or “Astérix The Gaule”.  Later André Franquin, the creator of “Gaston” and without a doubt the cartoonist who made Spirou and Fantasio into the major force it became, joined this group of friends.

(Chick Bill by Tibet, borrowed from the Tibet site)

Tibet created several comics, was a keen caricaturist, and performed every task imaginable on the Tintin editorial staff.  He even worked as an assistant to Willy Vandersteen at the request of the Tintin mag when Vandersteen, one of the founding fathers of Flemish comics and as such quite often doing more than five titles at any one time, was too much behind on his work on Till Eulenpiegel.

(the first Ric Hochet album by Tibet and  AP Duchateau, published Lombard)
Tibet’s breakthrough with the general public came with the creation of Ric Hochet, which he drew from 1955 onwards, based on the scripts by AP Duchateau.  The adventures of this enterprising journalist still sells in the tens of thousands, fifty years and 76 issues later.  As if this wasn’t enough, he also created Chick Bill, a humorous western strip, in 1955, and continued to regularly publish new albums in that series up to his death (the sixtieth, Qui Veut Gagner Des Filons, is scheduled for later this month).  Three years ago, Tibet started a new series, Aldo Remy, which he positioned as a Ric Hochet in real life, and in which he allowed himself to be freed of the contextual censorship the Tintin value system imposed on him.

Tibet also wrote a volume of childhood memories for a French literary publisher, entitled “Qui fait peur à Maman?”.

Take care, Tibet.