Francis Masse  Francis Masse, known as Masse (born August 21, 1948 in Gap, Hautes-Alpes), is a French artist. In the early 1970s, he first became acquainted with his sculptures, then turned to animation and cartoon. The poetic universe of Masse is served by an unusual graphic design where the scenes are created by means of printing rasters, as well as by a subtle work on the relief, the frame and the perspectives. Mainly since "Les Deux du Balcon" (1985), Masse starts focusing primarily on the scientific subjects: physics, astrophysics, cosmology, chaos, quantum mechanics, and so on, and extrapolates them with fantasy in a nonsensical, poetic and jubilant universe. One finds the influence of Masse's work in the cinema of his English cousin: the Terry Gilliam of "Mad Magazine" and graphic crafts for Monty Python ("nonsense" version), as well as in the comic strip of his lost children: the Daniel Goossens of "" (geek version) and the of "" (applied version). Masse's universe, both erudite and off-the-wall, is praised and appreciated by his peers and scientists. The anonymous and absurd characters he staged, with their big noses, hats and coats, obsolete in everything evolve in a parallel world where codes are surprising. Frémion affirms that a strong work speaks only posteriorly and that the work of Masse will characterize our time as surely as Callot, Caravaggio or Daumier. In the late 1980s, Masse abandoned comics and devoted himself to sculpture. Since 2007, Masse exhibits his works, reissues his comic strips and albums and publishes original works. Translated content from ; see that page's history for attribution. After high school, Francis Masse studied at the art school of Nancy and then Grenoble, he makes himself known first of all with his sculptures, it is an unknown aspect of his work, which nevertheless became his main activity again since the early 1990s. From the early 1970s, he made his first comics, including the "beckettian" Le Roi de le monde () published in Le Canard Sauvage in 1973. Very early, he produced animations whose graphic design described by Romain Brethes as audacious, inimitable and unclassifiable and prefigures the peculiar style of his comics. Yves Frémion points out that his universe was in place since the beginning, but graphically progressed very quickly.