Jean-David Morvan, back in Tokyo !

2025-07-06 2025-07-06

こぎつね

From Saturday 1st November to Sunday 2nd November 2025, the Tokyo BD Festival will welcome scriptwriter Jean-David Morvan in collaboration with Dupuis publishing! He has written over 230 works, including the science fiction series ‘Sillage’ and the classic ‘Spirou et Fantasio’. He has also collaborated with Japanese authors such as Jiro Taniguchi, Toru Terada, Hikaru Takahashi, and Hiroyuki Ooshima.

The fourth volume of the series ‘Madeleine, résistante’ (Madeleine, Resistance Fighter), published by Dupuis, will be released this autumn. Jean-Divd Morvan met Madeleine Riffaut on 8 May 2017, after seeing the documentary ‘Résistantes’ (Women in the Resistance) by chance on television. He was struck by Madeleine's strong personality and lifestyle, and felt a deep need to talk to her. Madeleine, for her part, felt it was her duty to share her memories. Madeleine told him her story with great candour, sometimes with emotion, in order to convey her message. She used to say: ‘I am not a victim, I am a resistance fighter.’ Jean-David Morvan wrote the screenplay based on Madeleine's stories and strove to transcribe them as faithfully as possible. As a result, ‘Madeleine, résistante’ is not simply a biography, but also a work that allows Madeleine's ‘living voice’ to resonate.

作家プロフィール

Jean-David Morvan
（ジャン-ダヴィッド・モルヴァン）

Jean David Morvan was born on 28 November 1969 in Reims, France. Already a fan of Franco-Belgian comic books, American comics and Japanese cartoons on television, he decided at the age of 11 that he would become an illustrator.

A few years later, he discovered Akira and Appleseed, translated into American. He was lucky enough to be invited to Japan by Mitsubishi, as his parents were car dealers. There he discovered mangashi and tankobon, which would become his third major narrative influence.

After briefly studying comic book art in Brussels, he abandoned drawing and signed his first professional contracts as a scriptwriter.

In 1994, Nomad was released, published in the same collection as Akira in France. This was the first attempt at Euromanga. Many albums followed (more than 250 to date, published by all the major Franco-Belgian publishers, but also by Marvel in the USA, where he wrote a Wolverine story and a Spiderman story), including his bestseller: Sillage (20 volumes, over a million copies sold in France, 15 foreign translations), in close collaboration with Philippe Buchet, a series they are currently attempting to adapt into manga.

Together with Thibaud Desbief, they shared a studio in Tokyo (Nakano). The Go Ichi Maru studio was both a workplace and a meeting place for authors from all walks of life. Terada Toru (whom Jean David had met in 2002 thanks to Ms. Motoki from Shueisha and Mr. Okada from Ultra Jump) would occasionally drop by to work there, as would Ooshima Hiroyuki, Takahashi Hikaru, Saito Naoki and other talented authors who worked with him for France.

As well as Taniguchi Jirô, for whom he wrote the script for ‘Mon année’ (My Year), a full-colour album in French format.

In Japan, Jean David Morvan also worked with Fujiwara Kamui on the magazine Comic Ryu. An international scriptwriter, he is keen to continue creating manga, which offer unlimited narrative possibilities.

He also invented the SENSEI heritage collection at Kana, published ASHITA NO JOE and CYBORG 009 with Glénat, and introduced authors such as Inio Asano to the public.

Since 2011, he has been publishing, with the prodigious Dominique Bertail as illustrator, the MADELEINE RÉSISTANTE series, based on the story of his friend Madeleine Riffaud, who died at the age of 100 at the end of 2024. This series, described as an ‘instant classic’, has won them numerous awards and the first three volumes have already sold over 200,000 copies.