Simon Pierre Mbumbo

About Simon Pierre Mbumbo

Artist

Cameroun

Author’s Graphic Novel, Humour, Sociopolitical

All audience

Simon Mbumbo was born in Cameroon and has lived in France since 1999. At the age of 22, he met Yves Poinot, President of the Angoulême Comics Festival, who encouraged him to come to France to train at the Beaux-Arts in Angoulême. After completing his training, he worked for Bayard Presse for 4 years, collaborating on several collective comic strip projects in France. In 2003, he co-founded L’Afrique dessinée with Christophe Edimo, an association of African comic strip authors living in the European Union. In 2009, he illustrated Malamine, un Africain à Paris on the theme of African immigration to France (a 120-page album published by Les Enfants Rouges, based on a script by Christophe Edimo). The album was nominated for the Prix de la Région Centre at the BD BOUM festival in Blois. Noting the absence of collections dedicated to Africa and the difficulties for an African author to exist in the French comics publishing landscape, he created Toom éditions in 2018, specialized in African comics. With this structure, he develops a dynamic of partnerships with authors of various origins around African comics.