Renée French (born 1963) is an American comics writer and illustrator and, under the pen nameRainy Dohaney, a children's book author, and exhibiting artist.
Her work is characterized by her "obsessive-looking and highly unsettling visual style."[1]
Her work includes H Day (Picturebox), The Soap Lady (inspired by the display in the Mütter Museum) (Top Shelf Productions), The Ticking (Top Shelf Productions), and Micrographica (Top Shelf Productions), Edison Steelhead's Lost Portfolio: Exploratory Studies of Girls and Rabbits (Sparkplug Books), and Marbles in My Underpants (Oni Press). She also has a weekly strip The Taint in the New York Press. Her serialized comic Baby Bjornstrand appears on the Study Group Comic Books website.[2]The New York Times said her graphic novels "split the difference between adorable and horrifically gross";[3] writing about "Baby Bjornstrand", they called it "equal parts Daffy Duck and Samuel Beckett, and all quirky Renée French".[4]
French has a serialized illustrated story in the Fantagraphics Books quarterly Mome called "Almost Sound". She is also the author of the comic book for children, Barry's Best Buddy, released by Toon Books in 2013.[5]
As a child, French found a book plate of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and was enchanted by it. In regards to the influence, French stated "I don't know how many hours I stared at it under the covers, but I'd memorised each little scene within the paintings and thought about them all the time. That world was so real to me."[6]
French suffers from migraines, which she uses to her creative advantage, as detailed in her interview with WOW x WOW. Her book, H Day, is "an attempt to show what it's like to have a migraine, from the outside and the inside."[6] According to French, "most of the portraits with things exploding out of the face or the skin warping around the head, are based on the migraines."[6]
French grew up in New Jersey, and was always drawing as a child.[6] French is married to Rob Pike, one of the creators of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and of the Go programming language at Google.[8] They split their time between the United States and Australia.[6]
