Spirou and Marcinelle

Franco-Belgian Comics: Bande Dessinée

Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Spirou, the Marcinelle School and Franco-Belgian Humour

If Tintin stands for the careful, realistic side of Belgian comics, Spirou stands for the comic side. The magazine published by Dupuis, from a town near Charleroi, gave the tradition its funniest characters: a clumsy office worker, a fantastical creature, a cowboy faster than his shadow, and small blue creatures who became a worldwide franchise. This chapter follows the magazine, its great artists and the humour of what is called the Marcinelle school. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Magazine

1938

Le Journal de Spirou was launched in April 1938 by the publisher Jean Dupuis, whose firm was based at Marcinelle, near Charleroi (check). Its hero, Spirou, was a bellboy in a red uniform, created by the French artist Rob-Vel. The word spirou is Walloon for a lively, mischievous child, or a squirrel (check).

Wartime and after

Jijé (Joseph Gillain) took over the hero in 1943, and in 1946 the young André Franquin took over from him (check). Under Franquin the series, Spirou et Fantasio, became a comic adventure with a journalist friend, a pet squirrel named Spip and a mad inventor, the Count of Champignac.

The rival house

Dupuis (Spirou) and Le Lombard (Tintin) stood for the two Belgian magazine camps in the 1940s and 1950s, one with a looser, funnier style and the other with the clear line (check). Artists sometimes moved between the two, and readers often chose a side.

The Marcinelle school A name for the artists who worked for Dupuis in the 1940s and 1950s, most famously Franquin, Morris (Maurice de Bevere), Jijé and Will. They shared a rounded, energetic, caricatured style, sometimes called the big-foot or "fat nose" manner, in contrast to Hergé's cooler realism. Together with Peyo they made Spirou the home of Belgian comic strips (check the names usually included).

The Great Series

Series (check each)	Note
Spirou et Fantasio	Adventure and comedy with fantastic inventions. Franquin created the Count of Champignac, the mad rival Zorglub and, in 1952, the Marsupilami, a long-tailed yellow-and-black jungle animal who speaks only its own cry (check the date). Later artists carried on the series.
Gaston (from 1957)	Franquin's gag-a-page strip about Gaston Lagaffe, a lazy, accident-prone office boy at the magazine's own offices, whose inventions and schemes bring chaos to his colleagues. In British publication he was called "Gomer Goof" (check). A rare case of a hero who is also a comic anti-hero: he does nothing useful, and readers love him for it.
Lucky Luke (from 1946)	By Morris: a cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow. The scenarios were written by René Goscinny from the mid-1950s, before he moved to Pilote (Chapter 5) (check). A parody of the American western by a Belgian artist, with real historical characters such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid.
Les Schtroumpfs (the Smurfs, from 1958)	By Peyo (Pierre Culliford): small blue creatures who live in mushroom houses in a village and speak with the word "schtroumpf" replacing nouns and verbs. They first appeared in another Peyo series, Johan et Pirlouit, before getting their own (check). An American television cartoon series in the 1980s made them famous worldwide (check).
Others	Tif et Tondu, Buck Danny (aviation) and many more; the magazine ran a wide mix of humour and adventure (check).

The Humour

The gag page. Many Spirou series are built on single pages with a complete gag. Franquin's pages in particular have an exact comic rhythm, with chain reactions of cause and effect (check).
Slapstick and sound. The drawings carry movement and noise: cartoon sound effects, faces that stretch and objects that fly.
The workplace and the village. Gaston is a comedy of office life, and the Smurfs a comedy of a closed village with a clear social order. Both rely on a regular cast and familiar situations.
Wordplay. The Smurf language and Franquin's puns and invented words show the French-language tradition's fondness for playing with sounds (compare German Humour: Does Germany Have a Sense of Humour?, Chapter 2).
A darker side. Franquin also made a series of black-humour drawings for adults, Idées noires (from the 1970s, check), about war, cruelty and death. He is often cited to show that humorous comics can carry serious feeling.

A British comparison The nearest British parallels to Spirou are the Dundee comics The Beano and The Dandy: the energy of the chaos, the sound effects and the troublemaking hero. Dennis the Menace (1951) and The Bash Street Kids (1954) are frequently compared with Gaston and his colleagues (check). The difference is the second life: the French-language gags were collected in hardback albums that adults bought for themselves, and the characters were treated as classics, not as disposable weekly fun.

Check the details Dates, creators' roles and the names of English translations change from source to source, and several are from memory. The attribution of scripts and drawings on long-running series, which passed through many hands, is particularly easy to get wrong. Check a standard history or the publisher's own site.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Compare the "Brussels" and "Marcinelle" approaches to comics in style, subject and humour, using one named series from each.

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Exercise 2

Gaston Lagaffe is a hero who does very little. Explain why this works as a comic premise and how it compares with a British comic character of your choice.

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Exercise 3

Explain why the Smurfs and Lucky Luke were so exportable, and what each loses or gains in translation.

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Quick Reference

Magazine: Le Journal de Spirou (1938), Dupuis, Marcinelle
Artists: Franquin, Morris, Jijé, Will, Peyo
Series: Spirou et Fantasio, Gaston, Lucky Luke, Les Schtroumpfs
Creations: the Marsupilami, Count of Champignac, Gaston Lagaffe
Style: rounded, energetic, caricatured; contrast with Hergé's clear line