'Misty Mission'.
Michel Koeniguer was a French comic creator, specializing in crime and war comics. Mostly released in trilogies, Koeniguer's stories are characterized by their thorough documentation, sense for human drama and focus on aviation. With his one-shots 'The Bridge' (2008) and the trilogies 'Bomb Road' (2010-2012) and 'Misty Mission' (2016-2018), he revisited the daily life of soldiers in Iraq and Vietnam. One of the staples of the publishing house Paquet, he was working on a well-received trilogy about World War II, 'Berlin sera Notre Tombeau' (2019-2020), until an untimely death cut his promising career short.
Early life
Michel Koeniguer was born in 1971 near Strasbourg in the Bas-Rhin department of France. During the 1990s, he studied at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts. He subsequently attended the Plastic Arts section of the University of Strasbourg, while seeing his first artworks published in fanzines.
'Bushido'.
Crime comics
In 2002, Koeniguer made his professional debut, when Éditions Pointe Noire released the first installment of his crime series 'Bushido' (2002-2004), starring a killer of the Italian-American Mafia with only six months to live. An orphan of a Japanese mother, he goes to his country of origin in search of Bushido, a medieval moral code of the samurai. Shortly after the first book came out, Pointe Noire went bankrupt, leaving Koeniguer without a publisher. Luckily, volumes 2 and 3 of his series were picked up by the Swiss publishing house Paquet. The collaboration with Paquet proved profitable, and Koeniguer moved on to create his next trilogy, 'Brooklyn 62ND' (2005-2007). Bringing back some of the characters from 'Bushido', Koeniguer returned to the streets of New York, where the unorthodox police officers Kotchenko and Reyes take on gangsters, killers and corrupt cops.
'Brooklyn 62nd'.
War comics
By 2008, Michel Koeniguer turned to creating war comics. His first effort in the genre was the one-shot 'The Bridge' (2008), about the 1st Marine Corps Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq's Kerbala region. The narrative exposes the parallel between the horrors of war and one of the Corporals' experiences with street violence and urban crime. Koeniguer's next project was the trilogy 'Bomb Road' (2010-2012), which appeared in Paquet's Cockpit collection. The main character is a retired Marine Corps pilot, who relives his Vietnam experiences, while worrying about his son, who serves in Iraq as an Apache helicopter pilot. Besides his focus on human drama, the author also showcased his interest in aviation for the first time.
'The Bridge'.
Between 2010 and 2013, Koeniguer additionally wrote the two-volume crime thriller 'Eightball Hunter', which was drawn by Damien Callixte. Again as an allround author, he returned to aviation and the Vietnam War for another war trilogy, 'Misty Mission' (2016-2018). This time, two estranged childhood friends from different backgrounds refind each other while serving in Vietnam. Sticking to the trilogy format, Koeniguer then switched to World War II for his next project, titled 'Berlin sera notre Tombeau' ("Berlin shall be our Grave", 2019-2020). The well-documented story shows the horrors in Berlin during the final days of the war, from the viewpoint of a group of French Waffen SS volunteers.
Death
The first two installments of what turned out Michel Koeniguer's final trilogy were well received, until an illness put an abrupt end to his career. After spending three months in the hospital, Michel Koeniguer died of a heart attack on 7 April 2021. He was only 49 years old. By then, he had finished the first twenty pages of the third and final volume of 'Berlin sera notre Tombeau'. The remaining pages were drawn by Vincenzo Giordano, and the book was released posthumously in April 2022.
'Berlin sera notre Tombeau'.