Undertaker

Dorison Xavier

Undertaker Vol 5 · Europe Comics

About this eBook

Lin and Rose have gone their separate ways, so Jonas Crow is left alone with his hearse and Jed, his pet vulture. Winter has set in and there's plenty of work to do—plenty of bodies to bury. When a childhood friend, Sid, looks him up and offers him a dangerous job, Jonas eventually agrees to it. Time, however, changes all things, loyalties included. Sid may not be trustworthy, but he was right about one thing—Jonas is the only undertaker in the Old West crazy enough to go after a corpse in Apache territory.

About the author

Born in Paris in 1971, Ralph Meyer was very young when he first started to cultivate his taste for drawing and stories. When the time came to think about what to do with his life, it seemed natural to choose comic books. As an insatiable young reader, he enjoyed the slapstick humor of "Gaston" and the adventures of "Blake and Mortimer" just as much as the existential problems of tight-clad superheroes populating the "Strange" comics monthly. His discovery of the work of Giraud (aka Moebius) during his adolescence would later have a considerable influence on his own work. At 20, he left Paris and moved to Belgium to take illustration classes at the Saint-Luc Institute in Liège. When he finished his three-year course, he began approaching publishers with various different projects, but to no avail. In 1996, he decided to present his work to writer Philippe Tome. Tome offered Meyer a particularly sinister plot to work with. A year later, they released the first volume of the "Berceuse Assassine" trilogy (1997 Dargaud, 2016 Europe Comics, "Lethal Lullaby"). In the meantime, he founded with a few other authors the "Parfois j'ai dur" workshop. This was where he produced "Des Lendemains sans nuages" (Le Lombard; "Clear Blue Tomorrows," Cinebook) which he co-illustrated with Bruno Gazzotti, with Fabien Vehlmann writing the script. Next up, still with Vehlmann, he started the sci-fi series "IAN" (Dargaud; Cinebook in English) which narrates the adventures of a being of artificial intelligence, complete with human skin and nerves. In 2008, he and Xavier Dorison released the first volume of the "XIII Mystery" collection (Dargaud, Cinebook in English), for which he was awarded the Brussels 'St. Michel' prize for illustration. 2010 saw quite the graphic turnaround for Meyer, with "Page Noire," a one-shot scripted by Denis Lapière and Frank Giroud. In 2012, he and Xavier Dorison teamed up once again for the Nordic landscapes of the "Asgard" diptych, soon followed by a third collaboration on the on-going series "Undertaker," which continues to enjoy unprecedented success (2016, Europe Comics). Ralph Meyer lives in Liège with his family and his cat Microbe.

Xavier Dorison was born in 1972. After three years of business school, during which he launched a college comic book festival, he started writing "Troisième testament" (Glénat), a series illustrated by Alex Alice. Following that, he worked with Mathieu Lauffray on the series "Prophet" (Humanoïdes Associés), and then with Christophe Bec on "Sanctuaire" (Humanoïdes Associés). In a very short time, Xavier Dorison carved out his status in the world of Franco-Belgian comics, which was confirmed by "W.E.S.T." (Dargaud; "Spooks," Cinebook), co-written with Fabien Nury for one of the biggest names in realism, artist Christian Rossi. But Dorison didn't limit himself just to the world of comics. In 2006, the film "Les Brigades du Tigre" was released, an adaptation of the TV series of the same name, which Dorison again co-wrote with Nury. In 2007, he teamed up once more with Mathieu Lauffray for "Long John Silver" (Dargaud, Cinebook in English), which also met with huge success. In 2008, publisher Dargaud called on Dorison to write the script of the first volume of "XIII Mystery" (published in English by Cinebook), a spin-off of the famous series "XIII." The artwork was done by Ralph Meyer, and this would be the beginning of another prolific collaboration, including the Viking epic "Asgard" (Dargaud, Europe Comics in English). And in 2014, with Thomas Allart, Dorison produced "H.S.E." (Dargaud; Europe Comics in English), a tale of suspense about the downward spiral of an ultraliberal society. As an author with a high output, Dorison tends to work on several comic book series at the same time. Switching with ease between the aforementioned series, and his latest and greatest success "Undertaker" (Dargaud 2015, Europe Comics 2016), he's proved his ability to work with genres varying from adventure to westerns to historical drama, without ever losing the energy of the plot line and the structural solidity that characterize his work. It thus comes as no great surprise to know that he was entrusted with a recent volume of one of the all-time biggest adventure series of Franco-Belgian comics, the legendary "Thorgal" (Le Lombard, Europe Comics/Cinebook in English). He has also made a splash with his latest work, the historical fantasy series "Aristophania" (Dargaud, Europe Comics), created alongside Joël Parnotte.