Biography
Jean-Claude Forest was born in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, a Paris suburb and graduated from the Paris School of Design in the early 1950s and immediately began working as an illustrator.
While at the Paris School of Design Forest drew his first comic strip, Flèche Noire (The Black Arrow). After creating Le Vaisseau Hanté (The Ghost Ship) he illustrated several issues of Charlot, a popular French comic book series loosely based on Charlie Chaplin. Forest eventually became the premier cover artist of French publisher Gallimard's leading French science-fiction paperback imprint, Le Rayon Fantastique, also drawing covers for numerous French newspapers and magazines including France Soir. Together with renowned film director Alain Resnais, Forest was one of the founders of the French Comic-Strip Club in the early 1960s.
Forest became world famous when he created the sexy sci-fi strip Barbarella, which was originally published in France in V-Magazine in 1962. The strip was an immediate bestseller and was soon translated into a dozen languages. In 1967 it was adapted by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim and made into a major motion picture, with Forest acting as design consultant.
Forest created many other cartoons and comic books, also writing scripts for comic strips and for French television.
He was awarded the Grand Prize at the 1984 Angoulême Comics Festival and in Sierre (Switzerland) in 1986.
Jean-Claude Forest suffered from severe asthma for many years and died in 1998 at the age of 68.
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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