Pierre Christin in a writer born at Saint-Mandé in 1938. After graduating from the Sorbonne, Christin pursued graduate studies in political science at SciencesPo and became a professor of French literature at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. His first comics story, Le Rhum du Punch, illustrated by his childhood friend Jean-Claude Mézières, was published in 1966 in Pilote magazine. That year he again collaborated with Mézières to create the science-fiction series Valérian and Laureline for Pilote. He has also written several other comics one-shots, including The City That Didn't Exist (La Ville qui n'existe pas).

Enki Bilal was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1951, and moved to France aged 10. At age 14, he met Rene Goscinny, and began to focus his attention on a serious art career in comics, starting with strips in Pilote magazine. The Nikopol Trilogy, his most famous work, took over a decade to finally complete, and has been released as both a videogame, called Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals and a film, directed by Bilal, called Immortal, starring Charlotte Rampling.