Frédéric Boilet

Frederic Boilet was born in Epinal, in the Vosges department of eastern France, on 16 January 1960. He entered the Ecole des beaux-arts de Nancy in 1978 and graduated in 1983.

That same year he published his first album, La Nuit des Archees, with Bayard Presse, on a script by Guy Deffeyes. He then drew two volumes of the historical series Les Veines de l'Occident for Glenat, written by Rene Durand.

In 1987 came his first album as both writer and artist, Le Rayon vert, which critics admired but few readers saw because its publisher, Magic Strip, went bankrupt soon after. It was reissued in 2009. With 36 15 Alexia in 1990, about meeting people through the Minitel, he began working almost entirely from photographs and video.

In 1990, helped by grants, Boilet travelled to Japan with a camcorder and a camera. Working from his images and notes, he and Benoit Peeters made three albums together: - Love Hotel (Casterman, 1993) - Tokyo est mon jardin (Casterman, 1997), with grey tones by Jiro Taniguchi and his assistants - Demi-tour (Dupuis, 1997), set at Dijon station on the night of the 1995 presidential election

In 1994 he was a resident at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, and in 1995 he co-founded the Atelier des Vosges studio on the Place des Vosges in Paris with Christophe Blain, David B., Marc Boutavant, Emile Bravo, Emmanuel Guibert, Joann Sfar, Fabrice Tarrin, Tronchet and Helene Micoud.

He settled in Japan in 1997, published work for Japanese manga magazines and became a rare Western comics artist with real success in the Japanese market. In 2001 he released L'Epinard de Yukiko (Yukiko's Spinach) simultaneously in France and Japan, and on 12 August 2001 signed his Manifesto of the Nouvelle Manga, which called for adult, universal auteur manga about everyday life. He also co-translated and graphically adapted Jiro Taniguchi's Quartier lointain for Casterman from 2002, and from 2004 to 2008 created and directed Casterman's Sakka and Sakka Auteurs collections.

Boilet returned to France at the end of 2008 and gradually stepped away from the comics world. He settled in the Vosges with the artist Aurelia Aurita, whose autobiographical book Fraise et Chocolat told the story of their relationship. He worked with her on Vivi des Vosges, published by Les Impressions nouvelles in 2011.

In 2014 he published 286 jours, a photographic narrative made with the Spanish artist Laia Canada. His friends remembered his passion for cooking and his generous hospitality at his house in the Vosges.

He won the Petit Robert prize at the Quai des Bulles festival in 2006.

Frederic Boilet died on Tuesday 10 November 2026 at the Maison Jeanne Garnier, a palliative care home in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. He was 66 and had been seriously ill since the spring.

His death was announced by his friend and collaborator Benoit Peeters, who wrote that he had the sadness of announcing the death of his great friend, and reported the same day by ActuaLitte. Peeters ended his tribute: "Many of us are mourning him."

Boilet is remembered as both an author and a go-between, someone who brought French and Japanese comics together well beyond commercial exchange. His method of drawing from photographs and video, which he called, borrowing from Francois Truffaut, verification by life, gave his books a quiet, intimate realism. Peeters called L'Epinard de Yukiko his most beautiful album.

His adaptation of Quartier lointain played an important part in Jiro Taniguchi's success in France, where the book won the scenario prize at Angouleme in 2003, and his Sakka collections introduced French readers to a generation of Japanese auteur manga artists.