October 11, 2012
Pat Mallet, 1941-2012
Pat Mallet, the humor cartoonist and successful advertising artist who was best known for a school of gag cartoons featuring alien characters, died on September 29 according to
this report at the French-language comics news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com.
Mallet was born in 1941 in Marseilles. He was raised in Paris. Mallet attended Paris' Ecole des Arts Appliques school in the mid- to late-1950s, where he was apparently a peer of two of the great creators of the French-language comics scene in the latter half of the 20th Century: Moebius and Jean-Claude Mézières.
His was a more standard career path. Mallet became well known for his humor work, primarily those featuring iconic aliens of the cute "green man" variety. He did two features of that type:
Xing and Xot for
Spirou;
Zoum for
Pilote. This apparently also included a track of slightly erotic gag cartoons, discussed
here. Other prominent comics gigs were
Pegg Le Robot at
Spirou and
Nina for Germany's
Bild der Frau.
Both major
Spirou features debuted within months of each other in 1960; the characters share a fictional universe. A last adventure called
Cosmos Fleuri was a story featuring both sets of characters. The two serials also share an element of publishing history in that each feature appeared in the magazine and in a comics mini-comics insert included with that magazine. In fact,
Xing and Xot was created for the latter format.
The artist won the Montreal's Grand Prix Internationale de la Caricature in 1972 and again in 1978.
A career in advertising illustration included campaigns for European brands Renault and Fernet-Branca.
He was 71 years old.
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