Alix #32 - 'La Dernière Conquête'.
Marc Jailloux is a French comic book artist, who started out working in the fantasy genre, but became best known for his work on Jacques Martin's historical series 'Orion' and 'Alix'.
Early life and career
Marc Jailloux was born in 1973 in the Bordeaux region, and developed a passion for comics by reading the work of the Franco-Belgian masters. After obtaining his baccalaureate in Plastic Arts, he attended the École du Louvre in Paris in 1991, and subsequently specialized in storyboards and lay-out at the animation faculty of the CFT Gobelins. Starting his career in 1994, he was initially active in the field of animation, finding employment with Ubisoft, the largest French producer of video games. One of the projects he worked on was the 2003 video game based on the 'XIII' comic series by William Vance and Jean Van Hamme.
'Le Château de Monsieur Sangsuc'.
Early comics
However, Jailloux didn't lose sight of his interest in comics. In 1998, he self-published his comic 'Gousdaïl le Vampire', and won the first prize at the BD AWARDS contest for the short story 'Comme ça se prononce', which was published in Spirou magazine in 1999. In 2002, he released the fantasy comic 'Le Château de Monsieur Sangsuc' with Éditions Pointe Noire and made the sole book in the series 'Necrolympia' with Stéphane Beauverger for Panini in 2005.
Gilles Chaillet/Jacques Martin
Jailloux enjoyed his breakthrough after meeting the Franco-Belgian comic master Jacques Martin in 2005. He got the opportunity to work in the atelier of Martin's former assistant Gilles Chaillet, for whom Jailloux worked as an inker on book 4 of 'La Dernière Prophétie' (2007) and the diptych 'Vinci' (Glénat, 2008-2009). By 2008, Jailloux presented a new plot for Jacques Martin's 'Orion', a series set in ancient Greece. In the early 1990s, Martin had personally written and drawn the first two albums of this series, with Christophe Simon drawing the third volume in 1998. Jailloux was greenlighted to proceed with his brand new 'Orion' story, which was published under the title 'Les Oracles' by Casterman in 2011, about a year after Jacques Martin's death.
Together with writers like Géraldine Ranouil and Mathieu Bréda, he has been working on plot and artwork of new stories in Martin's signature series 'Alix' from 2013 onwards. He succeeded Christophe Simon as the lead artist, although Marco Venanzi continues to produce an occasional album in alternation with Jailloux.
Orion - 'Les Oracles'.
Le Sang des Valois
Together with the scriptwriters Didier Decoin and Jérôme Clément, Marc Jailloux then began his own series of historical fiction at the publishing house Glénat, 'Le Sang des Valois' (2021- ). With intigues filled with plots, alliances and betrayals, the saga follows the story of two families over the course of several generations: the simple but valiant Tassin family and the Valois, who are descendants of the Capetian dynasty.
Le Sang des Valois #1- 'L'Homme du Fleuve' (2021).