Cartoonist, poster artist, designer, animation director

Bosc is en French cartoonist, poster designer and animated cartoon director born in Nîmes, France, on December 30, 1924. After his military service in France and Indochina, Jean Bosc rejoined the weekly magazine Paris-Match in 1952 and contributed cartoons to other publications as well (Punch, Esquire, France-Observateur). Many of his drawings have been published in the albums Gloria Viktoria, Homo Sapiens, Mort au Tiran (“Death to the Tyrant”), Les Boscaves (“Bosc’s Fools”, 1965), Si De Gaulle était Petit (“If De Gaulle Was Short”,1968) and La Fleur dan Tous Ses Etats (“Two Flowers”, 1968).

All his cartoons show absurd and often cruel incongruity, portraiting look-alike, almost interchangeable long-nosed men and children who wait on long lines or walk in funeral corteges or interminable parades. Bosc’s long stint in the army is probably responsible for the strong antimilitaristic slant in his work, with officers depicted as heartless fools, sometimes reduced to beribboned and bemedalled jacquets only, and privates seen as inoffensive, mechanical dunces forever performing menial and useless chores. Bosc also directed a few animated cartoons: Le Voyage en Boscavie (“Travels in Bosc Country”), which won the Emile Cohl Prize in 1959, and Le Chapeau (“The Hat”).

Like Chavel, Bosc saw no escape from the absurdity of the human condition: in 1973, at 49, he killed himself in Antibes, on the French Riviera. That same year, the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany, held a two-month exhibit of his work, along with that of Chaval and Sempé.”(Source: The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons).

http://ecc-cartoonbooksclub.blogspot.com/2008/10/jean-bosc-1924-1973-part-1.html

http://www.j-m-bosc.com/