Jean-Pierre Gibrat is one of France’s foremost realist auteurs, celebrated for his luminous full-colour watercolour pages and intimate twentieth-century historical narratives. His pair of WWII works — Le Sursis and its diptych companion Le Vol du Corbeau (2002–2005, Art Prize at the 2006 Angoulême Festival) — are landmarks of contemporary bande dessinée, and since 2008 his series Mattéo (Futuropolis) has traced the life of a Spanish anarchist across the wars and revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century.