“Michelangelo or nothing!” was, for a long time, his motto. It would be difficult to be more self-educated: he learned to draw alone by copying the masters he admired, the painters of the Renaissance or the 17th century. As Michelangelo’s place had already been taken, and as he could hardly aspire to the place of nothing, he resigned himself to simply being himself, Pellerin, a mixture of classic and fantasy, a taste for adventure and formal elegance.

He worked for a while in an animation studio in Reims, then discovered the tricks of the trade with Pierre Joubert. But it was history that fascinated him, and, from 1977 onwards, he devoted himself to illustrating school history books, educational or scholarly works, before going into cartoons when, after Jijé’s death, Jean-Michel Charlier asked him to draw Barbe-Rouge.

Two books of this saga appeared in 1983 and 1987: “Trafiquants de bois d’ébène” and “Les Révoltés de la Jamaïque”. Having caught the cartoon bug, he then tried his hand at scriptwriting, once again taking his inspiration from illustrious masters: Balzac, Gautier, Dumas, Stevenson.

He wrote the first three books of the series “Les Aigles décapités” (drawn by Kraehn at Glénat), then became a full author to produce “L’Épervier” for the collection Repérages. The perfect opportunity to recall Brittany, the sea and history, his three main passions, all at the same time.

An artist and a musician (he plays the baroque flute), a scriptwriter and an archaeologist, Pellerin likes to suit the action to the word and image. This is why he sometimes searches through the site of some 18th century dwellings in Guyana.

It was there, for example, that he came across a young woman, an ORSTOM engineer, who was smoking a pipe in a hammock after returning from an expedition in the forest, a parrot on her shoulder, and who had the latest comic strip issues delivered by parachute. That day, he realised that adventure really exists, however little we believe in it, and that we have to look for it across the seas.