Born in Lyon in 1982, Mikaël Bourgouin turned to the world of comics at a young age, first earning a technical diploma as an illustrator, specializing in layout and design, before entering the Emile Cohl institute to learn all he could about comics illustration.
Once out in 2004, it wasn’t long before Mikaël started work on an ambitious work called ‘Codex Angélique,’ which would turn into a three-part series published by Delcourt between 2006 and 2009. For the following few years, he mainly directed his artistic talents toward the realm of painting, to explore more personal subjects, in parallel with illustration work done for novel covers for publishers such as Albin Michel. Still, during this time, Mikaël also created the storyboards for the first two volumes of the series ‘Shangai’ (published by Drugstore in 2010), in collaboration with Mathieu Marolle and Yann Tisseron. This would prove significant a few years later when Mikaël and Mathieu teamed up to create the two-part series ‘Blue Note’ (Dargaud 2013, Europe Comics in English 2017), a gripping story that takes place in the United States during prohibition.