After secondary school, Margerin went to a school of applied art, where he met Denis Sire. He joined Sire's band, Los Crados, as a drummer. The band later became Dennis' Twist. In 1975, while looking for work in publishing or illustrating, Margerin met Jean-Pierre Dionnet, who ordered his first comic strip, a four-page parodicalscience fiction story named "Simone et Léon", for the Métal Hurlant magazine. He later drew and wrote several other stories for the magazine. His first album, Frank Margerin présente..., which gathered his first works for Métal Hurlant, was published in 1978. These first stories often have elements of science fiction, to fit with the other strips of Métal Hurlant. After "Simone et Léon", he also wrote and drew several works for Rigolo, a short-lived magazine. He won his first prize in 1980 at the Lucca Comics & Games festival in Lucca. His most famous character, Lucien, was created in 1979. Lucien is a rocker from Malakoff with a huge pompadour hairstyle that forms a cone in front of his face. Lucien first appeared as a friend of Ricky, another rocker, but he eventually became the center of the stories. With Ricky's and later Lucien's stories, Margerin comically described the life of suburban French rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bananes métalliques, one of Lucien's albums, was a commercial success in 1982 with over 100,000 books sold. His other characters included Albert and Mauricette, created in 1982, and Skoup and Max Flash, two journalists created in collaboration with Phil Casoar in 1984. In 1989, Les Humanoïdes Associés gave him the direction of a series of collective albums with the common title Frank Margerin présente... He also created Y'a plus de jeunesse for Albin Michel and worked on an animated television series, Manu, which was first broadcast on Antenne 2 in 1990. Manu was afterwards adapted into three comic books albums, with the collaboration of Altheau. In 1992, Margerin received the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. He therefore became president of the jury of the festival the next year, which was the twentieth edition of the festival.
