The Charlie Hebdo cartoonist who drew the French satirical magazine’s first front cover image following the deadly Islamist terror attack on its offices in January has decided to quit.
Renald Luzier, who draws under the pen name Luz, said in an interview with French newspaper Liberation that continuing to work at Charlie Hebdo had become “too much to bear.”
“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.”
Luzier’s front page drawing following the attack, which killed many of the magazine’s top editorial staff, depicted the Prophet Mohammed holding a sign that read “Je suis Charlie” with the headline “All is Forgiven.”
At the time, Luzier said he felt a sense of “catharsis” after drawing the cartoon. But last month, he said he would no longer draw the prophet, explaining that he “got tired of him.”
Charlie Hebdo had a history of depicting and lampooning Mohammed — taboo to some Muslims — and the gunmen who carried out the attack on the magazine were thought to be motivated by those parodies.
Luzier, 43, told Liberation that the decision to leave was “very personal” and that he wanted “to rebuild myself, to regain control of my life.”
“Finishing each edition is torture because the others are gone. Spending sleepless nights summoning the dead, wondering what Charb, Cabu, Honore Tignous would have done is exhausting,” he said, referring to some of his murdered colleagues.