Lewis Trondheim

Lewis Trondheim (born Laurent Chabosy, French: [ʃabɔzi], on 11 December 1964) is a French cartoonist and one of the founders (in 1990) of the independent publisher L'Association. Both his silent comic La Mouche and Kaput and Zösky have been made into animated cartoons. He explained his choice of pseudonym after the Norwegian city of Trondheim as follows: "As a last name I wanted to use a city's name, but Lewis Bordeaux or Lewis Toulouse didn't sound so good. Then I thought about this city, Trondheim… Maybe someday I will publish a book under my real name, in order to remain anonymous." Lewis Trondheim was first known as the author of Les formidables aventures de Lapinot (later to be translated to English as The Spiffy Adventures of McConey). He invented the character in the late 1980s as a way to learn cartooning. The result was an initial 500 page graphic novel, Lapinot et les carottes de Patagonie. All the while, he was publishing short stories for the satirical French magazine Psikopat.

After his book Slaloms was awarded what was then called the Alph'Art Coup de coeur (First comic book prize) in 1993, Trondheim was offered to bring his burgeoning series to a major publisher, Dargaud, while he continued churning out more personal books for L'Association and other independent French publishers such as Cornélius. From there onwards, Trondheim began to enjoy a steady rise in popularity.

The following years represented a period of increasing activity, as Trondheim began to work on many different projects. He first created La Mouche ("The Fly") for the Japanese market, and then redrew a French version from scratch, after which the character was adapted as an animated cartoon.

Trondheim's greatest breakthrough after Lapinot is arguably Dungeon (in French, Donjon), an ambitious series which he created with Joann Sfar, and which has enjoyed a fair amount of popular success.

In 1993, he married Brigitte Findakly, a comic colorist and screenwriter.