Book cover commissioned by Jean-Marc Lofficier for Black Coat Press.

"Pirates! Mummies! Cannibals! Intelligent Apes! Samurais! Cossacks! And even Saturnians! Meet Saturnin Farandoul and his companions, the fearless Mandibul and the extravagant Tournesol , as they travel the Earth and beyond in a series of wild and picaresque adventures!

Of all the authors who followed in the footsteps of Jules Verne, the most important was Albert Robida (1848-1926), a writer-artist who also became the founding father of science fiction illustration.

Robida wrote and illustrated The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul (1879), a mammoth, riotous and rollicking homage to Verne in which the indomitable Farandoul, raised by apes on a Pacific Island, teams up with Captain Nemo to conquer Australia, battles with Phileas Fogg in the American Civil War, meets Hector Servadac in orbit around Saturn, steals a white elephant from Michel Strogoff in Siberia and challenges Captain Hatteras at the North Pole...""

Albert Robida's rich biography can be found at Wikipedia and there is also this great site made by "The Association of Robida's Friends" :

"Genius of design and fantasy illustration, author, writer, painter and watercolorist, gifted with an amazing sense of the future, ecologist beforme time, affichist, Albert Robida left us an exceptional work: 60 000 drawings, 200 books illustrated ."