'Fête des Morts'.
Olivier Cinna was a French graphic novelist, whose relatively short career spawned crime comics like 'La Fête des Morts' (2011) and 'Ordures' (2014-2015) and the World War II graphic novel 'Hibakusha' (2017).
Early life and career
Olivier Cinna was born in 1972 in the Normandy city Caen. A talented youngster, he took courses in classical dance from the city's Conservatory and in drawing from the School of Fine Arts. As his interest was mostly focused on comics he enrolled at the Sint-Lukas School of Arts in Brussels, Belgium. It was during his education that he drew his first pages with 'Mr. Deeds', the comic character he would refine in the following years. Emmanuel Proust Éditions released the first (and only) 'Mr. Deeds' album, 'Le Mystère de l'Étoile' in 2005. The story about the mysterious watchmaker met with favorable reviews, and won the Prix Europe 2005 at the Brussels Comics Festival, but knew no sequel.
Stéphane Piatzszek collaborations
Cinna subsequently began a fruitful collaboration with the scriptwriter Stéphane Piatzszek, with whom he first made 'La Fête des Morts' (Futuropolis, 2011), a detective noir one-shot about a French police officer who works with the Cambodian police in their hunt for a pedophile network. Their next collaboration was 'Ordures' (Futuropolis, 2014-2015), about a group of youngsters who live a life of petty crime in the city suburbs.
Hibakusha
Cinna subsequently adapted Thilde Barboni's novel 'Hiroshima, Fin de Transmission' (1983) into the graphic novel 'Hibakusha' (2017), which appeared in the prestigious Aire Libre collection of Éditions Dupuis. The main hero was a German translator who was sent to Japan, while the title refers to the victims of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Final years and death
In 2019, Olivier Cinna passed away from a cardiac arrest, at the age of 46. At the time of his untimely death, he had drawn about 30 pages of his next graphic novel project, 'Permafrost', another collaboration with novelist Thilde Barboni.
'Hibakusha'.