Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, was a French cartoonist born in Paris on 21 August 1957 and killed in the same city on 7 January 2015. He is remembered above all for his long association with the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose offices were the target of the attack that also claimed the lives of several other cartoonists and contributors.
He studied drawing at the school on rue Madame in Paris and later at the École Boulle. In the early 1980s he began publishing in the press after an initial experiment in comics. He worked for La Grosse Bertha and L'Événement du jeudi, which he contributed to from 1987 to 1998, and for Jean-Edern Hallier's L'Idiot International. His drawings also appeared in L'Humanité, L'Humanité Dimanche, La Croix, Télérama, Politis and Science et Vie junior, among other publications with very different profiles, which shows how versatile he was. He first joined Charlie Hebdo in 1980 and returned to it when the paper was relaunched in 1992. He also worked for the weekly Marianne and the monthly Fluide Glacial.
His style, with agile line work and direct humour, can be seen in albums such as On s'énerve pour un rien (1991), Tas de riches (1999), Le Procès Colonna (2008) and 5 ans sous Sarkozy (2011). He also had a less familiar side in the French role-playing world, illustrating games such as Rêve de Dragon and MEGA and contributing to the magazine Casus Belli. His panda cartoons, produced in 2010 for the French branch of the World Wildlife Fund, are among his best-known works outside the press. He also took part in the Cartoonists for Peace collective and in projects with Clowns sans Frontières.
His legacy rests mainly on the defence of caricature as a form of political and social criticism, and on the memory of the colleagues who died alongside him. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, and at the ceremony held in his honour in Montreuil the trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf performed.