BD designer Claire Bretécher, creator of "Frustrés" and "Agrippine", died Monday at the age of 79, we learned on Tuesday from her publisher. "It is with deep sadness that Dargaud editions announce the death of Claire Bretécher on February 10, 2020, at the age of 79," the editor said in a press release. Claire Bretécher had quickly launched into comics "to escape boredom", she said.
In the early 1960s, after dropping Fine Arts, she taught drawing and delivered illustrations to the newspapers of the Bayard group. "Press drawings, strips, comics, whatever, I wanted to draw and my goal was to eat thanks to that," she explained. In 1963, she was invited by Goscinny to draw her "Rhesus Factor" in "The bone marrow". She then collaborated with the Tintin newspaper and then with Spirou where she created the "Gnan-Gnan". She then worked at Pilote (where she created the character of "Cellulite") then participated in the early 1970s in the creation of Echo des Savanes with her friends Gotlib and Mandryka.
The "sociologist of the year" 1976, according to Roland Barthes
Among the pioneers of comics, she was able to impose a style, a tone, an offbeat look of total originality. Observer detached from her time, she crunches through them with immense self-mockery. Press cartoonist, she drew in Le Sauvage and Le Nouvel Observateur where she published a board of "Frustrés" every week. Having launched into self-publishing, in 1988 she published the first album of Agrippina's adventures, followed by six others and a series of 26 cartoons broadcast on Canal +.
Her gallery of characters allowed her to tackle social issues that she very often identified well before most of her contemporaries. To the point that in 1976, Roland Barthes will say that she is the "sociologist of the year". She also practiced painting with talent, producing a series of striking portraits of her loved ones and uncompromising self-portraits. "A personality as disturbing as it is endearing, Claire Bretécher has traced a unique path in comics. Her humor and her freedom of spirit were immense, they will be missed by all her readers, we already miss her," said her editor.