des metaphors, a collection of more than a dozen colourful expressions brought to life. Death of André Gill Cohl's personal life was nowhere as rosy as his professional life would suggest, despite the birth of his daughter Marcelle Andrée in May 1883. Gill never recovered his sanity, and after a few months Charenton seized his property and drawings, auctioning them off to pay their bills. Cohl was unable to keep his hero in the public eye. Gill died on May Day, 1885, with only Cohl by his side. Cohl never forgot Gill's desertion by his friends and the public. The Incoherent movement collapsed in 1888. After the collapse of his marriage, Cohl moved to London to work for Pick Me Up, a humor magazine that specialized in French artists (he left his long-standing second job as a philatelist at this time). He returned to Paris in June 1896 and married Suzanne Delpy, the daughter of one of Gill's followers. Their son André Jean was born on 8 November 1899. By this time, Cohl had moved away from caricature, sending humorous drawings to bicycle magazines, family magazines, and children's magazines. He also wrote articles on French history, stamps, and fishing. In July 1898, he started contributing to L'Illustré National. This would become the origin of Cohl's comic strips. At the same time, Cohl's art moved from scene-setting to story-telling, and from the Gill fantoche style to Impressionism. Other interests during this period included puzzles, toys (he invented a few new ones), and drawings of figures made from wax matches. In the political arena, he submitted anti-Dreyfus illustrations to La Libre Parole Illustrée. Motion pictures By 1907, the 50-year-old Émile Cohl, like everyone else in Paris, had become aware of motion pictures. How he actually entered the business is shrouded in legend. According to Jean-Georges Auriol in a book published in 1930, one day Cohl was walking down the street when he spotted a poster advertising a movie obviously stolen from one of his strips. Outraged, he confronted the manager of the offending studio (Gaumont) and was hired on the spot as a scenarist (responsible for one-page story ideas for movies). The story is rather doubtful in the detail of which strip and which short film; it is also possible that the story is completely false, and that Cohl was approached for the job, either by director Etienne Arnaud or by artistic