Christian Lax

Christian Lax was born in 1949. After graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Saint-Étienne in 1975, he began his career as a freelance advertising artist. At the same time, he drew comic strips that appeared in Fripounet, Métal hurlant, Le Journal de l'auto, and other publications. In 1982, Glénat published his first album, Ennui mortel (Deadly Boredom), with Michel Aubrun as writer, and Lax became a comic art instructor at the École Émile-Cohl. In 1987, he published his first comic book as a sole creator, Des maux pour le dire (Worlds to Say It). In 1993, together with Frank Giroud, Lax created La Fille aux ibis (The Ibis Girl), a story set in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu and depicting the fall of the regime during the 1989 Romanian Revolution. This work was awarded the first France Info Prize for current events and reportage comic art in 1994. In 1997, he won the same prize for Chiens de fusil (At the Ready). An avid cyclist, he published a legendary trilogy centered on “the little queen”: L’Aigle sans orteils (The Toeless Eagle), Pain d’alouette (Lark's Bread) and L’Écureuil du Vel’d’Hiv’ (The Squirrel of the Vel' d'Hiv), works of fiction in which the bicycle serves as a metaphor for the suffering and dignity of the humble. L’Aigle sans orteils (Dupuis, “Aire Libre” series) earned him the RTL Grand Prize for Comics, the Historical Comics Prize at the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in Blois, as well as the Ecumenical Jury Prize for Comics in 2006, the Bédélys d’Or Prize, and the Best Screenplay Prize at the Chambéry Comics Festival. At the Émile Cohl School, Lax was the teacher of Frédéric Blier and wrote the script for his work Amère Patrie (Bitter Homeland), published in two volumes in the “Aire Libre” series by Dupuis between 2007 and 2011. In 2011, the BOUM Comic Book Festival awarded him the “Grand Boum-Ville de Blois” Prize for his entire body of work. Most recently, he published Une Maternité rouge (The Red Mother With Child, 2019, Futuropolis & Louvre Editions).