For more than a decade, Yvan Guillo has been working on his Samplerman oeuvre, in which he reworks material from ancient American comics into sometimes bizarre collages, inviting endless discovery. Lately, he has also discovered ancient Japanese woodcut prints. In the opening talk of Cross Comix Festival 2026 he will explain how he works and what he wants to convey. Read an older interview with him here.
Yvan Guillo (samplerman)
Yvan Guillo, aka Yvang is a French cartoonist born in 1971. He started publishing comics in numerous fanzines in the early nineties and thus far accepts invitations to take part…
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Yvan Guillo (samplerman)
Yvan Guillo (Samplerman)
Yvan Guillo, aka Yvang is a French cartoonist born in 1971. He started publishing comics in numerous fanzines in the early nineties and thus far accepts invitations to take part in micro published collective projects. His photocopied fanzine “Crachoir” (1992-2010), featuring his own comics and graphic explorations plus works from his friends was his main space of expression before his late acquisition of an Apple Macintosh PC and his adoption of the Internet around the year 2000.
The web became his favourite way of publication and experimentation for his comics, made available for anyone as soon as finished. During this period he perfected his practice of the photo edition software Adobe Photoshop for colorization in a way that would become very useful years later. At the time the increase in speed of the access to the Internet resulted in more and more availability of some good quality scans of old American comics from the golden age previously not easily available in Europe.
In a more classical vein, pursued in parallel with his experimental work, he published some children comic books, some auto-published and some at the now defunct éditions “Le Moule à Gaufres”, and worked as a freelance graphic designer. Around 2009, he started a shared Tumblr blog (with his friend French cartoonist Léo Quievreux), “zdnd”, la zone de non-droit (the no-go zone) in order to post experiments, side projects and often unfinished works.
The digital collages of golden age american comics labelled “Samplerman” started there, and the warm feedback from many followers, and continuous commissions for illustrations, Sleeves for LP Record etc. from many countries gave it a boost to go on. The Tumblr blog Samplerman took over in 2015, followed by his Instagram account. Samplerman was awarded the Prix de l’EESI in january 2019 during the Angoulème festival. He’s currently working on several forthcoming exhibitions, books and mini comics. He lives and works in Brittany, France.
