Renald Luzier, 43, the only Charlie Hebdo cartoonist to survive the massacre of the magazine’s staff, has said that he is leaving in September the magazine, citing stress and a lack of inspiration. “Luz” said his job without his slain colleagues had become “too much to bear”.
Luz said he has spent sleepless nights wondering about the work that his dead colleagues would have produced. Five cartoonists were among the 12 people who died in the Jan. 7 attack.
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“Luz”, was the one who drew the French magazine’s first front cover image after the deadly Islamist terror attack in January, showing the Prophet Mohammed weeping and saying “All is forgiven.”
In an interview Luzier explained he felt a sense of “catharsis” when the first issue after the killings came out, but last month, he said he would no longer draw the prophet, he “got tired of him.”
“There was hardly anyone left to draw, ” he said in the interview published on the newspaper’s website late Monday. “I found myself doing three front pages out of four.”
“It’s a very personal choice, ” Luz tells Liberation. He later added, “It became one of my obsessions after all this craziness to rebuild myself, to retake control of myself.”