Born on 3 February 1959 in Liège to a Polish father and a Belgian mother who met each other in the Congo, Alain Sikorski lives in Teheran until he is sixteen years old. He is the only cartoonist who nearly made it to the Olympics, in his case with the Iranian swimming team.
Having completed both his education in printing technology and military service in Germany, he works in advertising for three years and then starts out on his own, setting up his own business, which develops into a major studio. Unfortunately, the company has to be wound up in 1987, when a major client fails to pay up. Tired of the jungle of business, Sikorski then turns to a career in comic book illustration.
He has already developed a liking for this kind of work when working on an assignment for the Cockerill-Sambre steelworks in Liège; they had asked him to liven up dry accident reports with humorous cartoon strips to make employees more aware of the company’s safety regulations.
His cartoon-loving friends encourage him to continue. Although Philippe Vandooren is positive about the work shown to him in 1989, he lacks a catchy subject or character. Finally, Denis Lapière telephones him: would he be ready to take on a challenge? Taking over the illustrations for the “Tif et Tondu” series, of which forty episodes had already been published? Sikorski, who is into scuba diving, speleology and gliding in his spare time, and who once dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, loves a good challenge. He accepts. After months of research and trial and error, the new “Tif et Tondu” comes out. The duo stars in six albums from 1993 to 1997.
The end of this series prompts Sikorski and his scriptwriter to launch an ambitious production of detective stories, written in the spirit of the famous whodunits of the 1930s, in which, just before the end, the reader was invited to identify the killer using the deliberate clues in the previous chapters. Who will solve this mystery with the help of Alex and Keli, his new characters?
