Jean Giraud

Jean Giraud (born May 8, 1938) is a French comics artist. He is known under his own name, but also under the pseudonyms of Gir and Mœbius.

Jean Giraud is, with Jean-Michel Charlier, the creator of the western serial Blueberry, for which he's best known.

Giraud was born in Paris. At age 16, he began his only technical training at the Arts Appliqués. At 18, he was drawing his own comic strip, "Frank et Jeremie" for the magazine Far West.

In 1962 Giraud and writer Jean-Michel Charlier started the comic strip "Fort Navajo" for Pilote. It was a great hit and continued uninterrupted until 1974.

The Moebius pseudonym was born in 1963. In a satire magazine called Hara-Kiri, Moebius did 21 strips between 1963 and 1964 and then disappeared for almost a decade. In 1975 Métal Hurlant (a magazine which he co-created) brought it back and in 1981 he started his famous L'Incal series in collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowski. Moebius' famous serial The Airtight Garage also began in Métal Hurlant.

He has many times worked on design for science fiction films such as Tron, Alien, The Abyss and The Fifth Element. He also worked on US comics such as The Silver Surfer with Stan Lee. He cooperated with director René Laloux to create the science fiction feature-length animated movie Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters, 1982) based on a novel by Stefan Wul.

Giraud's prestige in France — where, generally speaking, comics are held in higher artistic regard than in the United States, where they are dismissed as children's entertainment — is enormous; there have even been postage stamps issued to commemorate him.

He is also known to have inspired many of Hayao Miyazaki's works, including, but not limited to, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. The two of them recently opened an exhibition in Paris, which showcases both artists' works.