Jean Roba

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Jean Roba (July 28, 1930 - June 14, 2006) was a Belgian comics author from the Marcinelle school. His best-known work is Boule et Bill.

1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 Awards
4 Notes
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Jean Roba is born in Schaarbeek, Belgium.^[1] In his youth, he was a reader of French magazines like Robinson and Mickey, which featured mainly American comics. After working as an illustrator for different magazines and publicity agencies, he started to work as an illustrator for Spirou in 1957, where he made small cartoons for the front page for a few years. He collaborated on different stories of Spirou et Fantasio with André Franquin, who taught him the basics of making comics, before starting his own main series Boule et Bill in 1959. Next to this series of mainly one page comics, he started in 1962 La Ribambelle, a series of 6 long stories about a group of kids.^[1]

Roba was both an artist and an author, and wrote most of his own gags for Boule et Bill, while others contributed stories for La Ribambelle. He handed over the drawing of Boule et Bill to Laurent Verron after more than a 1000 pages. His work has been translated in fourteen languages and has sold in excess of 25 million copies.^[1] He lived in Jette from 1951 until his death in Brussels in 2006.

[edit] Bibliography

Boule et Bill, 21 albums, Dupuis and 4 albums, Dargaud
La Ribambelle, 6 albums, Dupuis, with stories by Vicq, Yvan Delporte and Maurice Tillieux
Spirou et Fantasio, 2 albums Dupuis with André Franquin