The Masked Cucumber, comic book hero as crazy as he is a philosopher.
Its designer Nikita Mandryka died in the night from Sunday to Monday at his home in Geneva, Switzerland, said his editor Alain Beaulet.
He was 80 years old.
The designer, who also called himself Kalkus in his early days, received the Grand Prix de la Ville d'Angoulême in 1994 and the Heritage Prize of the Angoulême Festival in 2005 for his cult character.
From cinema to comics
Grandson of a senior officer of the Russian Navy driven out in North Africa by the Revolution of 1917, Nikita Mandryka was born in Bizerte in Tunisia on October 20, 1940. His vocation comes from the discovery of Spirou in his childhood.
The upheavals of history land his family in Morocco and then in Lons-le-Saunier.
He went to Paris to study cinema at Idhec, but finally opted for comics.
"With a paper, a pencil, and a brush, you make your own cinema", he said, quoted by Dargaud editions.
One of the pioneers of comics on the Internet
Le Concombre was created in 1967 in
Vaillant
magazine
.
This character lives in a desert at the end of the world, watches "television" and exclaims "Liquid pretzel!"
His favorite expression, whenever things go wrong, which is to say all the time.
After leaving this review, this pioneering founded in 1972,
L'Echo savannas
with Claire Bretécher and Marcel Gotlib.
He left to become editor-in-chief of
Charlie Mensuel
in 1982, then of
Pilote
in 1983. Le Concombre masqué returned as an album with Dupuis in the 1990s. In 1998, Mandryka became one of the pioneers of comics on the Internet, publishing boards on its own site.
Dargaud paid tribute to "a humor as offbeat as it is mind-blowing, a keen sense of derision and the absurd, a reinvented language, a controlled delirium, a striking graphics, all sprinkled with a few philosophical reflections".
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