Odile et les crocodiles
Chantal Montellier is a French comic book artist, known for her moody comics about disillusioned, bittered and lifeless people in cold concrete environments. Born in 1947, she studied Fine Arts in Saint-Étienne for six years, and started educating plastic arts in 1969. That same year, she took on painting and by 1972 she was making illustrations for leftwing publications like Le Combat Syndicaliste, L'Humanité Dimanche, France Nouvelle, La Nouvelle Critique, Révolution, Maintenant, L'Autre Journal and Le Matin de Paris.
Andy Gang
She made her first comics in 1974 for Métal Hurlant, Canard Sauvage and the women's magazine Ah! Nana. In the latter, she published the first pages of 'Andy Gang', a series that was continued in Métal Hurlant from 1978. Her short stories for this magazine were collected in several albums by Les Humanoïdes Associés, such as '1996' (1978), 'Shelter' (1980), 'Wonder City (1983), 'L'Esclavage c'est la liberté' (1984) and 'Odile et les crocodiles' (1984).
Andy Gang et le tueur de la marne
From 1978, she was a contributor to À Suivre with stories like 'Hôpital Bellevue' and 'Virginia Woolf', but most notably her 'Julie Bristol' serial from 1989. This series was collected in book format by Casterman and Dargaud between 1990 and 1994. Montellier additionally published several books with Futuropolis: 'Les Rêves du fou' (1981), 'Le Sang de la Commune' (1982), 'La Toilette' (1983) and 'Un Deuil blanc' (1987).
Shelter
Also for Dargaud, she made 'Voyages au Bout de la Crise' and 'Paris sur Sang: Mystère au Père-Lachaise'. In the 2000s, Montellier has worked for the publishing field, done illustration work and contributed stories to Psikopat. She returned to political comics after focusing on writing and workshops for several years when Éditions Denoël released 'Les Damnés de Nanterre' in 2005. In the following year, La Boîte à Bulles published the short story collection 'Sorcières, mes soeurs', while Actes Sud released 'Tchernobyl, mon amour', twenty years after the nucleair disaster in Tchernobyl. In 2008 Montellier worked with David Mairowitz on an adaptation of the Kafka story 'Le Procès' for MetroMedia. Chantal Montellier uses an esthetic photographic style, which shows traces of an early Jacques Tardi.
Le Proces