'Sherlock Holmes'.
The true identity of the mysterious mid-20th century French comic artist known only as Marc-Eric (or "Marc Eric") shall perhaps never be discovered. He is only known for a series of newspaper comic strip adaptations of several Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' stories (1959-1961), and even his successor André Chéret had no idea who he was.
Life and career
The signature of Marc-Eric appeared on the early comic strips of the French 'Sherlock Holmes' serial, distributed by Cino Del Duca's Mondial Presse agency to several regional newspapers, starting with La Voix du Nord. Other papers who carried the stories were La Liberté du Massif Central, La République du Centre, Sud-Ouest, Ouest-France, Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace and L'Union. The 'Sherlock Holmes' stories adapted into a text comic format, with text appearing underneath the images, were 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet' ('Le Diadème de Béryl'), 'The Sign of the Four' ('Le Signe des Quatre'), 'The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb' ('Le Pouce de l'Ingénieur') and ('The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire' ('Le vampire du Sussex'). After about 400 strips, André Chéret replaced Marc-Eric in 1961 as the artist of the final 100-200 episodes.
Since so little is known about the illustrator, Marc-Eric might possibly be a Francophone pseudonym for one of the Spanish artists working for publisher Cino Del Duca.
'Sherlock Holmes'.