Exhibition "Dreamland" - Reno Lemaire

The Dominique Bagouet Space invites you from October 14, 2026, to March 21, 2027, for an exhibition dedicated to the Montpellier mangaka Reno Lemaire and his series Dreamland.

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 1 PM and 2 PM to 6 PM

Dreamland is the dream come true of a kid from Montpellier; the story of a young reader of Japanese mangas, American comics, and Franco-Belgian comics, a video game enthusiast, who dreams of drawing in turn, practicing by copying, experimenting, and learning as a self-taught artist.

From a high school student at Mas-de-Tesse, now renamed Jules-Guesde, who became a student at Paul-Valéry, he observes everything around him and listens to his city, its streets, its squares, its café terraces, the echoes of conversations heard, the life situations experienced… Everything that will later be transfigured, reinvented, and serve as the backdrop for Terrence's adventures.

From his years of learning, Dreamland was born, a project submitted to Pika Editions in the mid-2000s, with the first volume released in 2006. It took courage, audacity, and probably a bit of recklessness to follow in the footsteps of the Japanese manga masters!

With determination and talent, this unconditional admirer of Dragon Ball and One Piece has plenty. With his foundational readings, he quickly perceives the incredible narrative potential of manga, and its ability to create new, coherent, rich, and ever-evolving worlds. To meet the expectations of a very demanding audience, readers who were long skeptical about the possibility of a manga written by a Frenchman, Reno Lemaire works tirelessly, constantly drawing, re-evaluating his past works.

Imagined, written, and drawn for the first time in Montpellier, Dreamland is twenty years old, but the adventure is far from over.

Author Biography

Reno is a Montpellier author. Self-taught, he has been expressing himself in panels and speech bubbles since the age of 7. Discovering manga at 15 completely changes his way of telling stories. The graphics, dynamics, format, and layout constantly stimulate his imagination, and he churns out pages and series on his high school desk.

In 2004, at the age of 24, he proposed a one-shot of Dreamland, which he wrote in a week, to Pika Édition, and began to be pre-published as early as 2005. Reno develops his graphic language through various media: video games such as J-RPGs or Capcom fighting games, comics like Petit Spirou, Asterix, and Lanfeust, animated films like Disney's The Lion King, mangas including Dragon Ball, Bastard, and Dragon Quest - The Adventure of Dai, and animes such as Goldorak, Saint Seiya, Thundercats, and Olive and Tom.

Dreamland is his first published work. With the success of the series, Reno has gained unprecedented recognition in France for an author. His always innovative graphic style and sense of storytelling are the main reasons for this. But he has also made a name for himself through the many hours spent signing his works at conventions and festivals. His constant good humor, his contagious passion for his work, and his regularity in releasing volumes have helped him build a loyal audience that grows with each new release!

He was one of the first to form a studio "like in Japan," with assistants, in France. Salim Kafiz and Romain Lemaire (the author of Everdark) assisted him from volumes 1 to 15. Since volume 20, he has two new assistants, P-E and Geo.

The Dreamland series in a few numbers includes: 24 volumes of 230 pages, with a 25th volume set to be released in 2027, over 230 chapters, an artbook of 400 pages, a mook, a new edition, the Remaster edition, for which he completely redrew the first ten volumes, the first French manga published and still ongoing, 800,000 copies sold, and a print run of 25,000 copies for each new volume, an anime currently in production, numerous merchandise and figurines…

In 2018, Reno Lemaire published in Japan, in the magazine Tezucomi, a one-shot in homage to Osamu Tezuka's Leo the Lion. He designed the first audio manga for France Culture, Doruido. In September 2024, Dreamland will be published in Japan by the publisher Euromanga. In October 2024, a new series, Free Quest, will be released, for which he will write the script and storyboard, with the young mangaka Néo on art.

In March 2025, he will publish in the first European manga magazine ISSHO, a mini-series MOTHER JACK, with Kana Editions. In 2026, the manga will be adapted into an animated series, produced by the French studio La Chouette Compagnie and broadcast on the anime streaming platforms ADN and Crunchyroll.

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