French, b. 1959 Didier David, better known under his pseudonym Cromwell, is a French artist, illustrator, and cartoonist born in Guer to a military household. Initially enrolled at the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, he changed course to study art at the Gobelins school of visual communication in Paris. Cromwell's early career was shaped by his induction to Asylum, a group of young artists and scenarists predominantly active in the 1980s. The group traded knowledge and shared camaraderie, working amongst one another on several animation projects, notably Les Mondes Engloutis, otherwise known overseas as Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. In the years that followed, Cromwell published several bande dessinées including Le Bal de la Sueur (1985), Minettos Desperados (1989) and most famously Anita Bomba (1994), a baroque interstellar fantasy published by Casterman as well as in the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine. He demonstrates his attraction to North America's dense woodlands and prairie runners in The Last of the Mohicans, a tale drawing from the adventures of Natty Bumppo. The artist is lauded for his usage of acrylic on splash pages, blending a vibrant and inventive graphic style with a rhetoric that is frequently disruptive and subversive. As one of the pioneers of a new school of comics, Cromwell made an unusual method more accessible to a larger group of comic book creators, illustrators, and consumers.