Yslaire

Bernard Hislaire was born in 1957 in Brussels into a family of words: his father was a journalist at La Libre Belgique, and his mother was a senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was in 1975, at just 18 years old, that he joined the art team at Spirou, then under the leadership of the writer Brouyère, with the support of Charles Dupuis and Raoul Cauvin. The major weekly magazine was then emerging from its golden age and seeking a new lease on life in the face of the wave of modernity sweeping through France, led by Métal Hurlant. Hislaire created his first series in 1978: Bidouille et Violette, hailed as the first “melancholic” love story in Franco-Belgian comics. With this term borrowed from Gainsbourg, Hislaire was already signaling his love for the tender, melancholic stories that would define his success. Bidouille et Violette earned him the Prix Saint-Michel for humorous storytelling as early as 1980. 

1986 marked a year of change: in genre, artistic style, and above all, name. Hislaire became Yslaire. Under this new pen name, he teamed up with Balac (one of Yann’s pseudonyms) to create a grand, baroque epic: Sambre, which would appear in the pages of Circus. The timing was perfect: Franco-Belgian comics were undergoing a revival, shifting toward an adult readership. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution and class strife, the saga unfolds the story of two star-crossed lovers, tinged with a dark romanticism conveyed through the realistic art style that Yslaire had cherished since childhood. From the very first volume, the reviews were rave: Plus ne m’est rien (Nothing Matters Anymore) earned him the Grand Prix Saint-Michel, and the five subsequent albums confirmed his growing success. The sixth volume of Sambre was published in 2011 and won the Best Album Award at the Brussels Comic Festival that same year. 

But Yslaire is not one to repeat himself. As early as 1997, he was one of the first major Franco-Belgian artists to embrace digital technology with Mémoires du XXe ciel (Memories of the 20^th Century Skies), in which he brings together a silent angel-photographer and an elderly psychoanalyst to discuss the past century. In 2009, he co-authored Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre (The Sky Over the Louvre) with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.