François Corteggiani was born in Nice on 21 September 1953. In 1974, his attempts to work professionally as a cartoonist led him to create numerous small cartoons for monthly magazines in Lyon that published complete stories.
A brief period of time at Spirou (“Mucheroum”) then a long collaboration with Michel Motti working on the character of “Pif, the Dog” and several short-lived personal series (“Pastis” in Pif Gadget, “Hank and Totty” in Gomme, “Minimatou” for Toboggan) encouraged him to mainly devote himself to writing scripts.
Thus he wrote numerous complete stories for Pif Gadget (illustrated by Dimberton, Cavazzano, Cance, Yannick, etc.) and invented more and more humorous characters with Pierre Tranchand (“Chafouin et Baluchon” for Djin in 1979, then “Bastos et Zakouski”, “Marine”, “Smith et Wesson”, “L’école Abracadabra”), Giorgio Cavazzano (“Silas Finn”) and Philippe Bercovici (“Robinson et Zoé”, “Testar le Robot”,” Kostar le Magnifique” etc.)
From 1985, he started writing long realist sagas for Marc Malès (“De silence et de sang”), Walter Fahrer (“Le Casque et la fronde”), Victor de la Fuente (“Francis Falko”), Jean-Yves Mitton (“L’Archer blanc”), Georges Ramaioli (“L’Horus de Nékhen”), Norma (“Saïto”), etc.
After the death of Jean-Michel Charlier, the prolific Corteggiani took over the scripts of “La Jeunesse de Blueberry”, with an equal talent for both humour and large-scale realistic adventures.
