March 10, 2012

2012Jean Giraud, French author and illustrator (born 1938)^[†]

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was a French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim predominantly under the pseudonym Mœbius for his fantasy/science-fiction work, and to a slightly lesser extent as Gir, which he used for the Blueberry series and his other Western-themed work. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé.

2012Frank Sherwood Rowland, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1927)^[†]

Frank Sherwood "Sherry" Rowland was an American Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research was on atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics. His best-known work was the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion.