Montellier, Chantal
Entry updated 30 March 2026. Tagged: Artist, Author.
(1947- ) French painter, cartoonist, graphic artist and author, active from the late 1960s. Although well known in France for strongly argued left-wing works, and for an abiding focus on Feminist issues, she has perhaps not received due recognition in translation. One central work at least has been published in English, Social Fiction (coll/omni 2003; trans Geoffrey Brock 2023), which contains two novella-length narratives chronologically preceded by 1996 (circa 1976 Métal Hurlant), a concatenation of surreally linked vignettes of Dystopian life set, as is the entire book, in and around New York. Shelter (1978-1979 Métal Hurlant), variously released in various formats, depicts an increasingly straitened existence in an underground mall after a nuclear Disaster, evoking the Pocket Universes of much Genre SF set Underground under similar circumstances; in this case, echoing tales like Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (13 July 1890 San Francisco Examiner), the protagonists experience long ordeals between a nuclear explosion in the mall and their almost instantaneous death afterwards. And Wonder City (13 February Métal Hurlant) is set under a Near Future government which secretly shapes its subjects through stringent Eugenical procedures (see Cultural Engineering).
Montellier's fiction, which remains untranslated into English, verges on the fantastic. [JC]
Chantal Montellier
born Andrézieux-Bouthéon, Loire, France: 1 August 1947
works (highly selected)
- Social Fiction (Paris: Vertige Graphic, 2003) [coll: graph: containing 1996, Shelter and Wonder City: illus/binding unknown/Chantal Montellier]
- Social Fiction (New York: New York Review Comics, 2023) [trans by Geoffrey Brock of the above: illus/pb/Chantal Montellier]
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