The Belgian artist, illustrator, and cartoonist Dominique Goblet was born in Brussels in 1967 and grew up in a French-Flemish family. Goblet studied fine arts at the Institut Saint-Luc, completed an illustration course from 1987 to 1990 and later earned her teaching qualifications in English and art. Since the 1990s, she has been a member of the Frémok artists’ collective of the French-Belgian comic avant-garde, and she later joined the artists’ association L’Association.
Her first book »Portraits crachés« (1997) is a compilation of stories and illustrations originally published in major comic magazines such as »Frigo«. Her first graphic novel »Souvenir dʼune journée parfaite« (2001; tr: Remembering a Perfect Day), which was published as part of the project »Récits de villes«, is positioned at the borderline between autobiography and fiction and asks questions about past, present, life, and death. For »Les hommes-loups« (2010; tr: The Wolfmen), Goblet again collaborated with the writer Guy-Marc Hinant. In the autobiographical comic story »Faire semblant cʼest mentir« (2007; tr: To Pretend is to Lie), which she began twelve years earlier, she deals with her relationship with her alcoholic father. The fragile aesthetics of this sketch-filled graphic novel, which also reveal various corrections, on the one hand reflect the erratic creative process and on the other convey the basic feelings to which the adolescent was exposed: forlornness and lack of security. »Goblet follows a literary-poetic path: she dives into the depths of her life with impressive consistency in order to banish in her experiences those thoughts and feelings that have universal validity« (»NZZ«). The book, which has been translated into six languages, earned several nominations at the Angoulême Festival and received the Prix Töpffer. In 2011 Goblet began a collaboration with the Berlin author and illustrator Kai Pfeiffer. For more than two years, the author duo worked on »Plus si entente« (2014; tr: More if it Clicks), a bizarre story about a single woman looking for a partner on the Internet. Based on the book, they also created the performance installation »Le Jardin des Candidats«, which took them on tour to the Fumetto Festival Lucerne, the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Arts Factory Gallery in Paris. In her most recent work »L’Amour dominical« (tr: Sunday Love) she and Dominique Théate tell of the triangular relationship between a famous wrestler, his bearded wife, and a criminal orthodontist.
Goblet was awarded the École européenne supérieure de l’image prize in 2010 and was President of the Grand Jury of the Angoulême International Comic Festival in 2019. She lives in Brussels and teaches narrative drawing at the ERG Academy of Fine Arts.