Pierre Bailly was born in Algeria, but he soon moved to Belgium. He studied at the comics section of the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels, under Pierre Pourbaix and Marc Sevrin. There, he met Vincent Mathy, with whom he did a small editorial project. He then studied graphics in La Cambre and published his first comic with the independent publisher Rêve-en-Bulles in 1993 ('Anguille Crue').