Pierre Dubois (author)

Pierre Dubois (born 19 July 1945), is a French specialist in fairy tales and folklore. He is an author, Franco-Belgian comics scriptwriter, and lecturer on fairies and little people in France.

His style of fantasy fiction is primarily Anglo-Saxon, in the manner of authors such as Bram Stoker, Mary Webb and Charlotte Brontë. He coined the term elficology (elficologie) as a name for the study of the "little people" (fairies and other similar beings), originally as a joke.

Fascinated at a young age by fairy tales and fairytale fantasy, he became an illustrator after studying the fine arts for a short period. His first comic book was published in 1986. Since then, he has produced one comic book a year and made regular appearances on television and at conferences relating to fairy tales, dreams, and legends related to fairies. Because of his encyclopedias of fairies, imps, and elves, published in the 1990s, Dubois won international recognition as a French specialist in magic.

Early life and education
Pierre Dubois was born in Charleville in the Ardennes, at the time located in the North Zone under the military administration of Belgium and the North. He remained "Belgian" for two years until the formation of the French Fourth Republic.

His father was an industrial designer, who forbade reading, in particular of comic books. His mother, by contrast, regularly took him to the cinema, where he saw Technicolor films and was introduced to such fantasy figures as Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Ivanhoe, and thus "met" the screen idols Errol Flynn and Elizabeth Taylor. When Pierre learned to read, he returned to the worlds opened to him by fantasy adventure films.

He spent part of his childhood near the Ardennes forest, an area with many of its own local legends. He rapidly developed a passion for legends about so-called little people. He began writing and drawing in childhood, "fascinated by image and narrative" and wishing to tell himself stories. He wanted to become a writer, but was criticized by his teachers for having "too much imagination" and writing "off topic." Pierre Dubois has described himself as a "bad pupil".

His family then moved to Valenciennes, in the Nord department, where he experienced a "contemplative and lonely" childhood. In the home's scullery, which served as a laundry room, he made up stories about the forest that he missed back in Charleville. His family sometimes returned to the region of his birth and spent vacations in Monthermé.

Comics and reading for pleasure remained family taboos for years, but he read the comics his mother bought for him in secret, including René Giffey's Buffalo Bill. As a teenager, he wanted to be a hitman, and at the age of fifteen, he wanted "to be edited by Jean-Jacques Pauvert or nobody".

Pierre Dubois' interest in and talent for illustration, as well as his pronounced dislike of school, led to his enrolment at the École des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes, where he learned drawing and etching. While still a student, he used a quill pen to write a manuscript on parchment covered with leather, which he succeeded in bringing to the attention of Jean-Jacques Pauvert. First receiving a rejection letter, he resubmitted his entire portfolio in person. Pauvert agreed to see him, but when Dubois refused to give him his only copy, the editor advised him to return in a few years.

Early career


Pierre Dubois left his studies early to devote himself to writing and illustration. He began his career as an illustrator for magazines like Creepy and Eerie, but had difficulty finding steady work. It was also at this time that he began to collect local legends that were at risk of being forgotten. When he was younger, he had had the opportunity to read La Malvenue (The Unwelcome), a novel by Claude Seignolle; as a young adult he performed his military service in Epernay, where he met the daughter of folklorist Arnold Van Gennep, who advised him to introduce himself to Seignolle. Dubois made drawings for him, and this contact finally "put his foot in the stirrup". He credits these meetings with Seignolle and later Gilles Lapouge for his passion for the "old crafts", popular fairy tales, folklore and the marvellous.