Early Life
Jean Giraud was born in Nogent-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, in the suburbs of Paris, on May 8, 1938. When he was three years old, his parents divorced and he was raised mainly by his grandparents. The rupture between mother and father, city and country, created a lasting trauma that he explained lay at the heart of his choice of separate pen names. In 1955 at age 16, he began his only technical training at the Arts Appliqués art school, where he started producing Western comics. He became close friends with another comic artist Jean-Claude Mézières. In 1956 he left art school to visit his mother in Mexico and he stayed there eight months, after which he returned to work full-time as an artist. In 1959-1960 he served his military service in Algeria, where he collaborated on the army magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises.
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