Hervé Baruléa, better known as Baru, was born on July 29th in 1947 in Thil in the department where he is still living, the "Meurthe et Moselle" (54). The eldest of three, he grew up in a working class bicultural family (his mother is French from Brittany and his father is an Italian factory worker).

Such social roots and origins might not make any sense if it were someone else but, as his readers know; they are not just accessories to Baru. As he says himself « they are an integral part of my world » and they give us a better insight into his work and personality.

Baru, who taught himself to draw inspired by popular culture, his working class roots, the events of 1968 and his admiration for Reiser and his friends at Charlie Hebdo, published his first drawings in 1975 in a periodical that he created with his friends from Nancy entitled Le Téméraire. Subsequently, without any order from a publishing house, he tackled his first story: Quéquette Blues, 140 pages in a single swoop and in colour - produced by his long standing friend Daniel Ledran. Futuropolis and Casterman show some interest but finally, after publishing a few short stories in Pilote (these will later appear in the collection La piscine de Micheville which was recently re-edited in 2009), it will be Dargaud that launches his career in 1982.

The young artist is immediately spotted : published in 1984, the first volume (Part Ouane) in Quéquette Blues wins the « most promising » award at the Angoulême Festival, which is then known as the International Comic Strip Show the following year. It is be the beginning of a long relationship and from then on Baru will often be an award winner at the event.

A surprising portrait of youth in a hurry to get on with life, somewhere between a scathing social chronicle, joy, rebellion and rock energy, the Quéquette Blues astounds, intrigues and pleases. These ingredients will often be found in Baru's albums, and he will never make compromise for the sake of good taste.

Surfing on the wave of his successful beginnings, Baru continues producing albums to the same standard. Two titles with Futuropolis (La communion du mino in 1985, Vive la classe! in 1987) before starting a new partnership with Albin Michel and the magazine L'Echo des Savanes which will publish, Camarade! (1988) and Le chemin de l'Amérique (script by Jean-Marc Thévenet), this last album winning the Best Album prize at the Angoulême International Comic Strip Festival in 1991.

Baru's adventure continues with a trip to Japan. He is in fact one of the rare French authors who at the beginning of the nineties, accepts collaboration with the review Morning published by Kôdansha. From 1991 onwards Baru will publish the episodes of L'autoroute du soleil, some 400 captivating strips of a French like road movie including action, irony, political engagement and scathing social fable.

The French editor Casterman, eager to rectify their mistake of letting Baru slip through their fingers in 1980, will publish the French version of the album in the unusual form of a thick single album in 1995. It was a triumph: and for the second time (which is a first) Baru wins the Best Album prize in Angoulême in 1996. The success will consolidate the relationship between them and Casterman will publish the artists albums: Sur la route encore (1997), Bonne Année (1998), followed by a tetralogy in 1999 entitled Les Années Spoutnik, a chronicle of working class provincial France in the fifties where Baru, beneath a childish exterior, produces a precise social and political chronicle with more than an autobiographical air about it.

2004 will see a new partnership with the publishers Dupuis, for a dyptic offering the tragic and remarkable portrait of a boxer, thirsty for success and social challenge: L'enragé. Finally in 2008 he will return to Casterman with Pauvres Zhéros the impressive adaptation of a thriller by Pierre Pelot, which will figure within the Festival's Official Selection. And with the Angoulême Grand Prize this month for the whole of his work it feels like Baru has finally come home. What good news.