Frédéric Boilet

Frédéric Boilet is a French cartoonist and a manga artist.

His debut in comic art was in 1983 with La Nuit des Archées. He created Le Rayon vert in 1987, followed by 36 15 Alexia in 1990, two albums where he experimented with a method of working, that is still uniquely his today, in which he resorts almost exclusively to photographs and video.
His encounter with Benoît Peeters in 1990 turned his work toward semi-autobiographical stories tinged with humour : Love Hotel (1993), Tôkyô est mon jardin (1997) and Demi-tour (1997).

For some years Boilet lived in Japan, where Tôkyô est mon jardin, meaning "Tokyo is my garden," was translated in 1998 and Demi-tour the following year. He started doing work for manga magazines in the late nineties, and was a rare example of a western comics artist having some degree of success in the Japanese market.

In 2001, on the occasion of the simultaneous publication in France and Japan of the critically acclaimed Yukiko's Spinach, he launched the Nouvelle Manga movement in Tokyo, which sought to combine mature sophisticated daily life manga with the artistic style of traditional Franco-Belgian comics.

Boilet's final production work was L'apprenti Japonais. Boilet claims to have finished his editorial career with this work, a book of unused drawings from the twelve years spanning from 1996 to 2008 all concerning the time he had spent in Japan. He now resides again in his native France.

(Source: Wikipedia)