Jean-François Miniac

Jean-François Miniac (born 1967), better known under his pen name Solidor, is a French comic book creator (writer and artist). He was born in Paris on 17 February 1967 and lives in France.

After a few drawing lessons taken at Hergé from 1976 to 1978, in 1987 he had a formal training in the visual arts at the Gobelins School of the Image in Paris.

In 1994, Claude Lefrancq, a Belgian comic publisher, asked Rosalind Hicks to publish Hercule Poirot's comic book, showing her the Blake and Mortimer's comic book, Mortimer versus Mortimer. In 1995, with the novelist François Rivière, French Agatha Christie specialist, Miniac drew his first cartoon series, "Agatha Christie", published at Lefrancq publishing, in Edgar P. Jacobs's spirit, in schematic style. It was a success.

After the publisher went bankrupt in 2000, EP publishers (La Martinière group, Paris) published the comic books, the first one in October 2002 and the second one in February 2003. In four years, 20 000 copies of each have been sold in France (At the end of 2006, 148 000 copies for all the books). In July 2007, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express were released by HarperCollins UK as a comic strip, adapted by François Rivière and illustrated by Solidor. These books will be published by HarperCollins in Australia the first November of this year.

Also, one Jean-François Miniac's ancestor is Louis Duchesne, a French historian (Académie française). Marc Tanguy, Saint-Malo's marksman, another ancestor was one of the survivors of the French 74-gun ship Redoutable at Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. At present, Miniac is writing his story.

English press

 * Mulholland Tara, International Herald Tribune, August 22, 2007.
 * Lane Megan, BBC News, August 22, 2007.
 * Beauman Ned, The Guardian, August 23, 2007.

Awards

 * 1997 : Public prize at Creil comics festival, France.
 * 2006 : Tournesol prize at Angoulême International Comics Festival, France.(Amiante, chronique d'un crime social).