Carine De Brab was born in Tubize on 21 April 1958; she discovered her true vocation through her childhood reading. “There were four of us girls at home, all crazy about comic books. We read tons of them. However, I was frustrated by the lack of an appealing heroine. And this made me feel like telling stories myself…”
Aged fifteen she studied art in Brussels and started working in the male dominated world of cartoons where she wrote scripts with Yvan Delporte for René Follet’s “Zingari”.
In 1987, she made a grand entry into Spirou with Delporte, both an admirer of her work and a working partner, along with the “Puzzoleti” characters: a young modern couple discover an unusual tribe, half-man half-beast, living hidden deep in the woods. “Yvan would tell the stories and I would make notes and produce an initial script. Then we would talk about it again and Yvan would write the dialogues. When he explained a scene to me, he would act it out it so well that he wouldn’t hesitate to break his pipe (empty, luckily) or to roll about on the ground!”
However, she did endeavour to draw inspiration from her childhood memories and started to sketch a little girl and her dog. However, it would be an association with a former teacher (Zidrou) and a youth leader (Falzar) that sparked things off. “I met them when I had produced the first strips of “Margot et Oscar Pluche”. They liked the strip and I entrusted them with writing the text. We published six titles at Casterman from 1992 to 1997. We then transferred to Dupuis and the series was re-christened “Sac à Puces”, the nickname of Oscar Pluche”.
In this tender and funny family tale, the trio centred each volume on a subject close to childhood preoccupations. To celebrate the change of publishers, they even depicted, with much delicacy and humour, a pregnancy in “Super Maman”, a rather unusual comic book subject. The readers of Spirou magazine were even able to choose the sex of the child and give it a name!
