Comic Book exhibition in Grenoble, France - April 2026

Hello World!

I hope you are well and surviving the heat if you are in the northern hemisphere, or the winter blues if you are down south!

Franco Belgian Comics

For the last 20 months I have been living in France, and on top of the excellent cheese and wine, there are some absolute gems of comics! More specifically what is called franco-belgian comics, as opposed to the US superhero comics or the japanese mangas.

The franco belgian comic style was born just after the second world war in France and Belgium with Tintin and Spirou. The other founding titles were Asterix, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, etc. These books are usually hardcover, 20 x 30cm (8.3” x 11.7”), 46 to 64 pages, fully colored and available mostly in French. Having grown up in the french speaking part of Switzerland in the 90s, I had an easy access to these books, hugely popular in Swtizerland, present in every household and read by both adults and kids.

So when I recently discovered that there was an exhibition of original pages of franco-belgian comics in a neighbouring town (Grenoble), I jumped on the opportunity to visit. I loved it so much that I had to go twice but I could have easily gone a third time, the exhibition was huge with tons of original pages (200 artists, 700 original pages), hugely inspirational too.

Most of these pages were drawn before the digital era so it is obvious that they were hand drawn and hand painted. But some of them are recent, and their authors made the decision to work traditionally, on a piece of paper, with inkpens, brushes and paint (watercolors, inks or acrylic).

Takeaways

The few things that stood out to me were;

• The size of the original pages. I am usually working 130% to 150% of the final printed book format as by shrinking, you are increasing the overall quality of the drawings. The small details will appear even smaller and some of the “mistakes” will disappear, or take less space on the page.

  
  
  
  

  So that means that if my final printed product is 20 x 30 cm, I will work on a page that has a minimum size of 26 x 39 cm (130%). But at this exhibition, some authors are working on humonguous pages, Philippe Druillet for example works on a piece of paper that is more than 300% the size of the printed page (70 x 100cm)!

  
  

“Guerriere de la Nuit” - Philippe Druillet

• The quality of the lettering (the text the dialogue), the movement lines and the sound FX, although done by hand, absolutely spectacular. And to make sure that the text was consistent throughout an entire book, they usually used a tool called the ames lettering guide.

  
  

 “Asterix chez les Helvetes” - Albert Uderzo

• The variety of the art style was mind blowing, my photos don’t cover all of the exhibition but here is a small selection of some of my favourites

“Lanfeust des etoiles” - Didier Tarquin

“Bouncer” - Francois Boucqu

“Blacksad” - Juanjo Guarnido

“Complaintes des Landes Perdues” - Philippe Delaby

“Transeperceneige” - Jean-Marc Rochette

“Carbone et Silicium” - Mathieu Bablet

“Shenzhen”- Guy Delisle

“Qui a tué l’idiot” - Nicolas Dumontheuil

“Le Vaisseau de Pierre” - Enki Bilal

There is something very special about seeing original art, you can almost feel the mood of the artist in some of the strokes! I also realized how labour intensive some of these pages are. I usually spend 6-8hours on a page, some of these pages must have taken double or triple that, especially with the size of paper they are using.

Coming out of this exhibition, I was overwhelmed by a mix of emotions. For a “professional” comic book artist like me, I felt hugely inspired, but at the same time, I never experienced a stronger imposter syndrome than this day! These comic book artists are the best of the best and have decades of experience, I just keep going on my modest path and try to have as much fun as I can on the way!

I hope you guys had fun reading this, it was awesome going back through these photos, I have got many more too!!

Talk soon!

p.s.: Voting are open right now until the end of the month for the Whitcoulls top 50 kids books, I would be really grateful if you could vote for Miles and Jones book #1, #2 and/or #3! You just need an email address, easy.