Michel Denni

Michel Denni was born on 14 June 1936 in Chelles, in what is now Seine-et-Marne. He studied engineering at the Ecole des Travaux Publics in Paris, but rather than following an engineering career he turned to writing and journalism in the early 1960s.

Denni began as a film critic for La Presse de Tunisie in 1962 and 1963. He was a member of the cooperatives ETUDREAL in Oran in 1964 and BERAL in Algiers in 1965, and then wrote as a specialist on Latin American politics for the Paris weekly Tribune socialiste in 1965 and 1966. A keen reader of science fiction, he published the story collection Mortibus in 1967.

In 1968 he took over the Librairie Lutece, a small second hand bookshop on the rue Monge in Paris. Under him it became a meeting place where cinema, popular literature, crime fiction, the fantastic, esotericism and comics met, and from 1976 it specialised in collectable comics. He was publication director of the review L'Oeil a roulettes and from 1979 to 2008 co-editor and then editor in chief of Le Collectionneur de bandes dessinees, where he studied the magazines and artists of the past.

In 1979, with Michel Bera and Philippe Mellot, he created the BDM, Tresors de la bande dessinee, a catalogue of French language comics with collectors' values. It grew from sixty pages to around two thousand over twenty five editions. He was a critic and columnist for Charlie Mensuel and Pilote et Charlie, co-wrote with Mellot the comic Jelly Shawn drawn by Georges Levis, and co-authored Images passions, Les Aventures de la BD (Gallimard, 1996) and the BD Guide encyclopaedias (Omnibus, 2003 and 2004). In May 1984 he was a founding member of the comics committee of the Centre national des Lettres under Francis Lacassin. From 2003 he wrote the column L'Echo du BDM for BDzoom.

Known to his friends as Max, Denni was remembered by Philippe Mellot as a demanding historian with a sometimes brusque manner who hid a wildly off beat sense of humour, and who felt close to comic artists such as Francis Masse, Gebe, Nikita Mandryka and Philippe Vuillemin. Later in life he devoted himself to fantasy fiction, publishing Le Maitre de justice (2002) and Kybalion (2007) under the pseudonym Kybalion, and Malefices in 2015. Mellot's tribute sent condolences to his family and to Isabelle Morzadec.

Michel Denni died in October 2026 at the age of 90. A civil death notice published at Bagnolet on 22 October gives the date as Tuesday 20 October 2026, while the tribute by Philippe Mellot on BDzoom on 25 October gave Thursday 22 October, in Paris. He died just before the first copies of the twenty fifth edition of the BDM were collected from its publisher. His funeral was set for Friday 30 October 2026 on the boulevard de Menilmontant in Paris.

The BDM became the standard reference for collectors of French language comics, and Mellot wrote that Denni had worked throughout his life for the discovery and recognition of the ninth art he loved. He was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1999.