Born in Liège in 1971, Vincent Mathy enrols in the comic strip section of Pierre Pourbaix and Marc Sevrin at the Institut Saint-Luc of Brussels. It was there that he makes friends with another citizen of the “Cité Ardente”, Pierre Bailly, who uses his paintbrush in a neighbouring class.
He gladly accepts when Bailly, one year his senior, proposes to work out a plan for a children’s series, created by scriptwriter Denis Lapière, also from Liège. Mathy takes on inspector “Castar” in his virtual world of cartoons within a cartoon and leaves it to his friend to do the character of “Ludo” in his “real” world. The idea is to compare the crazy adventures of a comic strip hero with the daily events in the lives of the young readers of the famous CASTAR-MAGAZINE.
They present their first “Tranches de quartier” in Spirou in 1997 and, on the occasion of its second episode 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.
At that occasion, Mathy and his favourite inspector systematically feature on the cover. (The first edition of the second album with Ludo, “Tubes d’aventures”, was offered to buyers of the complete limited edition collection of CASTAR-MAGAZINE.).
Since then, Ludo has experienced a new adventure every year.
