A son of French parents, Philippe Wurm was born in Lugano on the first of May, 1962. He studies classics in Brussels and then catches the comic book fever. He soon transforms into a collector of original manuscripts and tries his hand at drawing. His life changes when he meets Thierry Tinlot, because this young man, just as smitten as Wurm himself, encourages him to enrol in a comics course from Eddy Paape at Saint-Gilles. The course starts in September 1978, he attends for two years and takes drawing lessons from the painter Beauraing at the same time. A year at La Cambre rounds off his graphic education. At the age of twenty, he enrols in the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Brussels. He is awarded the Brussels Prix d’Excellence in 1987.
Still, his first attempts are systematically refused by Belgian and French editors. He finds consolation in his hobby, playing tennis, and discovers that there are special tennis magazines. And so it is Le Monde du Tennis which presents his first work at a rate of two plates a month, from 1983 to 1985. Didier Pasamonik collects the episodes and publishes them as Wurm’s first album, “La fabuleuse épopée du tennis”, at Editions Hachette in 1989.
As of 1990, he gets a few openings in Spirou and the short-lived Tintin Reporter. They accept a few strips and complete stories, but it will be Editions Claude Lefrancq which publishes his first more ambitious projects: several graphic adaptations of famous detective stories. He successively produces “La Cassette rouge” in 1992 (with a script by Jean-Claude de la Royère, based on the novel by Rex Stout with the same title) then three Maigret stories based on shooting scripts by Odile Raynaud (“Maigret et son mort”, “Maigret tend un piège”, “Maigret et la danseuse du Gai Moulin”, from 1992 to 1994).
When he meets the script-writer Stephen Desberg at a comic book festival in Paris, he starts on an archaeological detective novel situated in the 1920s, originally intended for the monthly À suivre. When this support is terminated in 1997, the series is continued in albums, published at Casterman from 1998 to 1999 under the generic title “Le Cercle des sentinelles” (“Les secrets de Karen”, “Le lion ailé”, “Bienvenue Mister Gandhi”). Henri Reculé takes over the final episode of this series (“Le chemin de Laurie”), since Wurm has just met Jean Dufaux and wants to work on something totally different: the saga of the “Rochesters” with a very British atmosphere and full of Jacobsian influences. Casterman publishes the first two volumes (“L’affaire Claudius” in 2001, then “Claudius ne répond plus” in 2002) and then Dupuis continues the modern fantasy in its Repérages collection (“La liste Victoria”).
