Salt Pit
François Vataux was born in Saigon, Vietnam on 11 April 1968, two months after the North Vietnamese Tet offensive. His family returned to France when François was two years old, but left for Ivory Coast two years later, where they spent the next ten years. Vataux finally settled in the Vaucluse department, where he picked up the punk lifestyle in the early 1980s. He messed up his studies, but did spend two years at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1987. Vataux subsequently held several odd jobs, before landing a job as a graphic artist with a local ad agency. In the late 1990s, he worked in an Arles-based animation studios on productions like 'Sonic the Rebel' and 'Archie's Weird Mysteries'. He is still active as a lay-out and storyboard artist. In 2008, Les Enfants Rouges published his debut graphic novel 'Salt Pit', a story written by Sasha about the atrocities in a secret CIA prison north of Kabul, Afghanistan.