The comic book author Nikita Mandryka, creator of the comic character the Masked Cucumber, died at the age of 80, we learned from his editors on Monday.
This designer who also called himself Kalkus in his early days died in the night from Sunday to Monday at his home in Geneva (Switzerland), told AFP the editor of his latest works, Alain Beaulet.
He received the Grand Prix of the city of Angoulême in 1994 and the Heritage Prize of the Angoulême Festival in 2005 for his character of the
Masked Cucumber,
a slightly crazy vegetable and a philosopher.
Grandson of a senior officer of the Russian Navy chased in North Africa by the Revolution of 1917, Nikita Mandryka was born in Bizerte in Tunisia on October 20, 1940. His vocation comes from the discovery of Spirou in his childhood. The upheavals of history land his family in Morocco and then in Lons-le-Saunier. He went to Paris to study cinema at Idhec, but finally opted for comics. "
With a paper, a pencil, and a brush, you make your own cinema
", he said, quoted by Dargaud editions.
Le Concombre was created in 1967 in
Vaillant
magazine
. This character lives in a desert at the end of the world, watches "
television
" and exclaims "
Liquid
pretzel !"
His favorite expression, whenever things go wrong, which is to say all the time. After leaving this review and working with
Vaillant,
this avant-garde in 1972 founded
L'Écho des savanes
with Claire Bretécher and Marcel Gotlib.
He left to become editor-in-chief of
Charlie Mensuel
in 1982, then of
Pilote
in 1983.
Le Concombre masqué
returned as an album with Dupuis in the 1990s. In 1998, Mandryka became one of the pioneers of comics on the internet, publishing boards on its own site. Dargaud paid tribute to "
a humor as offbeat as it is mind-blowing, a keen sense of derision and the absurd, a reinvented language, a controlled delirium, a striking graphics, all sprinkled with a few philosophical reflections
".