Pierre-Alain Bertola, 1956-2012

Pierre-Alain Bertola, a Swiss artist who split time between comics work, writing, scene design and illustration, died on August 17 in Nyon, Switzerland, after suffering a heart attack.

Bertola was born in Tannay -- a municipality in Nyon -- in 1956. He was trained as an architect. Bertola worked for editor Stephen Robial at Futuropolis in the late 1980s on two albums, Colonel Bauer (1988) and Les Sept Coluleurs du noir (1990). The year the second book was published he began a three-year stint as an illustrator for Geneva's La Tribune. In the mid-1990s he returned to publishing with a series of illustrated works for kids, all for La Joie de Lire: Le Gros Poisson Du Lac (1996), Hector (1997) and La Mort a Vivre (1998). A second lengthy illustration gig, this time taking him into this year, began in 1998 for Le Temps.

In 2009, Bertola returned to the comics form proper with an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, published by Delcourt as Des Souris Et Des Hommes. Bertola considered that a dream project, and talking about doing it in comics rather than as an illustrated prose adaptation cited both the general difficulty of doing comics but primarily the work's appropriateness for adaptation into that form.

Bertola's work was frequently shown. As a designer, he worked for several museums in Switzerland including the Musee d'ethnographie de Geneve and the Musee national suisse. He contributed scene design work to operas, most notably a 2005 production of Rossini's Voyage A Reims and a 2008 production of Mozart's La Flute Enchantée -- the Mozart was performed in St. Petersburg.

Pierre-Alain Bertola died on his 56th birthday.
 
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