Topic: Jacques Martin

Jacques Martin (born September 25, 1921 in Strasbourg) is a French writer and artist of comics. He is one of the classic artist of Le Journal de Tintin magazine, alongside with Edgar P. Jacobs and Hergé, of whom he was a longtime collaborator. He is best known for his series Alix.

After being initially forced into engineering studies as a young man, Jacques Martin began in 1942 to draw his first comic stories. In 1946, following the end of the War, he travelled through Belgium in search of an editor for his work. Soon afterwards he met Georges Remi (aka Hergé) with whom he collaborated on several albums of The Adventures of Tintin (and more specifically on Tintin in Tibet and The Red Sea Sharks) while working on his own albums. It was from Hergé that he learned of the ligne claire style and, under Hergé's guidance, began to use it in his own work. He would later be considered one of the great five of the ligne claire style, along with Hergé, Edgar P. Jacobs, Bob de Moor and Willy Vandersteen.

In 1948, he created Alix, his most famous series, published in the magazine Tintin, whose adventures - extremely-well researched - occur in Roman antiquity. This historic comic soon became one of the most popular of the genre and went on to be published in several countries worldwide.