Gotlib

Origins and early life

Marcel Gottlieb, who signed his work Gotlib, was born in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris on 14 July 1934 to Jewish immigrant parents: his father Ervin Gottlieb had come from Hungary, his mother Régina Berman from Romania.

Work and career

His father was arrested during the Occupation, interned at Drancy and deported; he was murdered at Buchenwald in 1945, weeks before the camp was liberated. The boy survived hidden on a farm at Rueil-la-Gadelière, in the Eure-et-Loir, where his mother had placed him and his sister. He came to comics through the children's weekly Vaillant, then joined Pilote, where with René Goscinny he created Les Dingodossiers and, from 1968, the Rubrique-à-brac that made him the great absurdist of French cartooning: a ladybird commenting on the story from the corner of the panel, Isaac Newton knocked senseless by apples, God drawn as a bearded civil servant.

In 1972 he co-founded L'Écho des savanes and in 1975 Fluide Glacial, the magazine that outlived him and turned adult humour comics into an industry in France. He returned without sentimentality to his own Jewishness and to the father he had lost, notably in the album J'existe, je me suis rencontré. He received the Grand Prix of the Angoulême festival in 1991 and died at Le Vésinet on 4 December 2016.