Originally from Marche-en-Famenne, Pierre Bailly’s parents worked in the voluntary service overseas and planned his birth in Algiers in 1970. Having become a true native of Liège, Bailly abandoned his scientific studies with a distinct lack of regret, and started at the comic strip department of Pierre Pourbaix and Marc Sevrin at the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels. It was there that he made friends with another citizen of the “Cité Ardente”, Vincent Mathy, who used his paintbrush in a neighbouring class.
Bailly studied graphic design at La Cambre and published his first piece of work for an independent editor (“Anguille crue”) at Éditions Rêve-en-Bulles in 1993) before meeting Denis Lapière at a contest organised by the FNAC in Liège.
He worked with this scriptwriter to make an appearance in Spirou in 1994 with “La Baleine de Gaana “. Then, in 1996, they created “La Saison des anguilles” for Dargaud.
His personal tastes led him in the direction of lighter things aimed at children. Denis Lapière therefore suggested “Ludo”. Bailly immediately adopted the character and his “real” universe. He called upon his friend Mathy to bring inspector “Castar” to life in his virtual world of cartoons within a cartoon. The idea of this was to compare the daily adventures of a young kid with those of his cartoon hero of whose series in the fictional Castar-Magazine he never misses an episode.
They presented their first “Tranches de quartier” in Spirou in 1997 and, on the occasion of its second session during the summer of the following year, the delighted team even put a supplement of nine issues of Castar-Magazine into the newspaper in which they and some of their friends have a field day at producing avant garde graphics. Since then, Ludo has experienced a new adventure every year.
