Christophe Badoux
Born in 1964.
Died in 2016.
Swiss comics, clear-line drawing, editorial illustration and visual narrative.
Christophe Badoux (1964–2016) was a Swiss draughtsman, comics author, illustrator and teacher. His work connected newspapers and magazines, publishing and sequential storytelling. Clear line and narrative readability remained constants in a practice extending from press drawing to the artist’s biography in comics.
From 1991 onward Badoux drew for numerous newspapers and magazines and illustrated schoolbooks. With the writer Marcel Gamma, he created “Stan the Hooligan”, whose stories appeared in fanzines from 2004 and were later collected in books. The character links part of his oeuvre to FC Zurich supporter culture and everyday urban life.
In 2003 he joined Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Design & Art, as a lecturer in Illustration. His teaching extended into research on visual narrative. He participated in “Reading Visuals”, a Swiss National Science Foundation-supported project investigating narrative techniques in sequential drawn stories.
He co-edited its publication with M. Vänçi Stirnemann and Pierre Thomé.
“Klee”, his drawn biography of Paul Klee, appeared in 2008 in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee. It traces the painter’s life through personal events, artistic development and historical context. The French edition was published in Geneva by La Joie de lire.
The book demonstrates the role of documentation in storytelling intended to remain accessible to a wide audience.
The City of Zurich recognised his work in 2009 with a half-year work grant of CHF 21,000 in the Comics category. In 2010 it documented his participatory project “Zürich 2050” during the Tram Zürich-West construction-site event: visitors were invited to imagine the city’s future with the artist on an 8 × 2 metre surface.
Following the loss of Christophe Badoux on 28 October 2016, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts paid tribute to the draughtsman and teacher on 7 November. His comics, illustrations and contribution to “Reading Visuals” reveal a career in which artistic creation, education and image research remained closely connected.