Pierre Dubois

French specialist in everything related to enchantment. He is an author, Franco-Belgian comics (bande dessinée) scriptwriter, storyteller and lecturer at the origin of renewed interest in fairies and little people in France. Fascinated quite young by fairy tales and Fairytale fantasy, he became an illustrator after only a short study of Fine Arts. He has brought together local legends and recreated them in radio and television shows for over thirty years. He is the inventor of elficology (elficologie) as a name for the study of the "little people" (fairies and other similar beings), although it was originally just a joke on his part. His first comic book was published in 1986 and knew only a success of esteem. Since then he has produced one each year and also made regular appearances on television and at conferences, always in the area of fairy tales, dreams and legends related to the fairies, who have become his specialty. It is largely thanks to his encyclopedias of fairies, imps, and elves, results of twenty years of research and published in the 1990s, that Pierre Dubois won his international recognition as a French specialist in everything involving magic . These encyclopedias sold thousands of copies at a time when they were the very first works of their kind in France. Since then the works of Pierre Dubois, whether art books, encyclopedias, collections of short stories or collections of stories for adults or children have experienced a certain success, marked by scholarship and humor everywhere. Pierre Dubois has himself become a source of inspiration for other writers and designers who have taken up the idea of elficology. Pierre Dubois is "a jack of all trades" who does as well at radio, television, and cinema, as in the literary world or the comic strip. In his speeches, his lectures and his interviews, he regularly evokes anecdotes from his childhood and his encounter with "the spirit of the place." ChildhoodPierre Dubois was born in Charleville in the Ardennes, then located in North Zone under the military administration of Belgium and the North. He remained "Belgian" for two years until the formation of the French Fourth Republic. He spent part of his childhood near the Ardennes forest, where many local legends circulate; this is where he began to believe in the "spirit of place". His parents moved to the Nord, in Valenciennes, which interrupted this and gave him a "contemplative and lonely" childhood. He described this "house of the North" with a scullery beside the garden which served as a laundry room, where he imagined stories, seeking the forest that was missing. Only reading, pictures and music could calm him down.During his childhood, he sometimes returned to spend his vacation in Monthermé. His father is an industrial designer who was very serious and often absent. He forbade reading and comic books. From when Pierre learned to read, it was to try to find the atmosphere of fantasy adventure films. Indeed, in the 1950s, his mother quietly took him to the movies on Thursdays to see Technicolor films such as Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Ivanhoe; Pierre Dubois thus "met" Errol Flynn and Liz Taylor. For a long time comics and reading had an image of contraband for him; he read the comics that his mother bought for him in secret, like René Giffeys Buffalo Bill. VocationHis style of fantasy is above all Anglo-Saxon, after the manner of authors such as Bram Stoker, Mary Webb and Charlotte Brontë, but also of Walter Scott, Lewis Read less