'Le Secret des Pôles' (2012).
Fabien Moustrou, also known as Sully, is a French comic artist from Lesparre-Médoc, and the creator of the funny animal children's series 'Les Aventures d'Achille' (2007-2015). In November 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years of criminal imprisonment for killing his uncle in 2020.
Early life
Born in 1976, Fabien Moustrou's talent for drawing and music was recognized from an early age. In both 1994 and 1995, he was awarded the Alph'Art Graine de Pro for young talent, the second time with his two-page story 'HIV', which offered a humorous take on AIDS. Also in 1995, he obtained a literary baccalaureate with an option in visual arts. Because of his musical studies - he studied the violin in Paris and Bordeaux, he carried out his military service in the marching band of the 57th infantry regiment at the Niel Barracks in Bordeaux. His parents had a troubled marriage, filled with domestic violence, and eventually divorced in 2005. Moustrou, who had developed social anxieties during his childhood, continued to live with his mother in Le-Verdon-sur-Mer, a town in the Lesparre-Médoc arrondissement of Gironde. With the creative and financial support of both his mother and his uncle, he began working on his comic projects.
Early comics
Fabien Moustrou's professional career in comics had taken off in 1997, when he participated in the collective comic book 'Chansons de Boris Vian en BD' of Éditions Petit à Petit, for which he made a comic visualization of the Boris Vian song 'J'Suis Snob'. In the following later, his solo comic book 'À Toute Allure!', about a comical car race, was published in the Comix collection of publisher Le Cycliste. Moustrou was also represented in the massive 1999 anthology book 'Comix 2000' of publisher L'Association.
'À Toute Allure!'
Achille, Le Gorille Mauve
Setting up his atelier in his hometown Verdon-sur-mer, Moustrou assumed the pen name Sully and began his own publishing imprint, Caboch Éditions. Between 2007 and 2015, he released four comic books starring the blue dog Caboch and Achille, the "last of the purple gorillas", in which he comically commented on mankind's treatment of animal species and the climate. In the first installment, 'Le Gorille Mauve' (2007), Caboch heads out to free his friend Achille from captivity by an evil zookeeper. In the following volumes, Caboch and Achille free the little black monkey Kikouyou from a secret prehistoric world ('Kikouyou à Disparu', 2009), save Pole wildlife from melting ice caps ('Le Secret des Pôles', 2012) and help another purple gorilla called Myrtille to escape the circus that captured her ('Myrtille', 2015). As a self-publisher, Fabien Moustrou used to sell his books at the Soulac-sur-mer market.
Conviction
Since 2020, Fabien Moustrou has been making headlines for a completely different reason. On 8 December of that year, a family dispute resulted in Moustrou killing his 83-year old uncle, Guy Laporte from Soulac-sur-Mer. Over the next couple of years, Moustrou's arrest, the investigation and subsequent trial were widely covered in the local news. Initially, Moustrou and his mother lied about the events to support the theory of an accidental fall. Later, the accused claimed that he had only limited memories of the event due to being under the influence of alcohol associated with taking psychotropic medications. During the second day of his trial, much to the surprise of his two lawyers, Moustrou eventually confessed to the murder of his uncle by hitting him in the face with a bedside lamp stand. On 28 November 2023, the Gironde Assize Court sentenced Fabien Moustrou to 19 years of criminal imprisonment, accompanied by 7 years of socio-judicial supervision and a ban on appearing for 7 years in Soulac-sur-Mer and Le-Verdon-sur-Mer. The only witness to the crime, his mother Danièle Laporte, sister of the deceased, received a prison sentence of four years for failing to assist a person in danger and helping disguise the crime as an accident.
'Le Gorille Mauve' (2007).