Suat Yalaz

Suat Yalaz — Biography

Suat Yalaz was born on 1 January 1932 in the Çiçekdağı district of Kırşehir to a civil servant's family, and his father's postings took his childhood through Denizli, Adana and Kayseri. His first cartoon ran in the paper Erciyes Postası when he was sixteen; he completed his higher education at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, standing out as a student among a new wave of cartoonists in daily papers and humor magazines.

After his 1960 adaptation of Abdullah Ziya Kozanoğlu's novel Kızıltuğ for Akşam drew wide attention, he created his best-known work, Karaoğlan, in 1963, opening doors in both publishing and, his greatest passion, film, where he adapted the character for the screen seven times. Settling in France in 1970, he had Karaoğlan published there for years under names such as Kébir and Changor, versions especially popular in French-speaking North African countries, notably Algeria. Under the pen name Gi-Toro he also produced adult comics, and he created another lasting character, Son Osmanlı Yandım Ali, likewise filmed in 2006.

Honored in 2006 with a Turkish postage-stamp series bearing the Karaoğlan name, Yalaz died of heart disease on 2 March 2020; comics veteran Abdullah Turhan died the same day, a coincidence that left Turkey's comics world in mourning.