'Militona'.
Pierre Donga was the pen name of the early 20th-century French cartoonist, painter, caricaturist and poster artist Pierre Duffourc. A longtime contributor to the newspaper L'Humanité, he made several literary adaptations in comic strip form, alongside historical biographies.
Life and career
Pierre Duffourc was born in 1908 in Bayonne in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in South West France. Born to a Spanish father, he was abandoned by his mother and placed in the care of the state. From the age of eight, he worked at a farm. As a cartoonist and caricaturist, he covered political and current affairs from a left-wing perspective. Also a courtroom sketch artist, he covered several of the major trials of his time. His social engagement also led to his participation in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and to his Resistance work during World War II.
Donga's His early illustrations and caricatures appeared in magazines like Le Cyrano (1932), Les Hommes du Jour (1933-1937) and Le Rire (1934-1937). Up until the 1970s, he was a contributor to magazines like Marianne, Aux Écoutes, L'Humoristique (1935), Ridendo (1936), L'Illustré du Petit Journal, Ce Soir (1937), Horizons, La Marseillaise, Front National (1946), L'Avant-Garde (1946-1954), L'Humanité (1946-1974), Action (1947, 1949), Regards (1947-1949), France Nouvelle (1947-1962), Le Populaire, La Tribune des Sports (1948), Humanité Dimanche (1948-1973), Almanach Ouvrier Paysan (1949-1951), La Vie Ouvrière (1955-1956), Détective (1963-1976) and La Terre. In 1976, Pierre Donga died of a cerebral hemorrhage while covering a trial for Détective magazine.
'Un Homme Véritable'.
L'Humanité: comics
Donga's comics production was limited to vertical and horizontal strips for the French communist press in the 1950s. Just like Gilbert Bloch, he adapted several literary works into the text comics format for L'Humanité, a paper for which he was also on the editorial board. His comics included Théophile Gauthier's 19th-century novel 'Militona' (1954) and Boris Polevoy's 'Story of a Real Man' ('Un Homme Véritable', 1956), a Russian novel about a Soviet World War II fighter pilot. Donga also made a strip about the Tour de France, called 'Plus d'un Tour Dans Votre Sac' (1955, script by Abel Michéa), as well as the science fiction serial 'S.O.S. Espace' (1958-1959), which was both a text and a balloon comic. The Tour de France feature was also printed in the papers Le Patriote and L'Echo du Centre. For the Sunday paper L'Humanité Dimanche, he produced an adaptation of the Russian sci-fi novel 'Andromeda Nebula' by Ivan Yefremov ('La Nébuleuse d'Andromède'), a serial about the life of 17th-century playwright Molière ('La Vie de Molière'), the historical comic strip 'L'Inquisition' and the full page text comic 'Le Chevalier de l'An Mil'.
'S.O.S. Espace'.