André Franquin: Encyclopedia II - André Franquin - Biography

André Franquin - Biography

André Franquin - Franquin's beginnings

Although he started drawing at an early age, Franquin got his first actual drawing lessons at École Saint-Luc in 1943. A year later however, the school was forced to close down because of the war and Franquin was then hired by CBA, a short-lived animation studio in Brussels. It is there he met some of his future colleagues: Maurice de Bevere (Morris, creator of Lucky Luke), Pierre Culliford (Peyo, father of the Smurfs) and Eddy Paape. The four of them were hired by Spirou in 1945, following CBA's demise.

In those days, this team (minus Peyo) was coached by Joseph Gillain (Jijé), who had transformed a section of his house into a work space for the three young cartoonists. Jijé was then producing many of the comics that were published in the Journal de Spirou, including its flagship series Spirou et Fantasio. The team he had assembled at the end of the war is often refered to as La bande des quatre (lit. "The Gang of Four"), and the graphical style they would develop together was later called the Marcinelle school, Marcinelle being a suburb of Brussels where Spirou's publisher Dupuis was then situated.

Jijé passed the Spirou strip to Franquin in 1946, in the middle of Spirou et la maison préfabriquée. For the next twenty years, Franquin largely reinvented the strip, creating longer, more elaborate storylines and a plethora of burlesque characters.

Most notable among these is the Marsupilami, a fictional monkey-like creature. The inspiration for the Marsupilami's extremely long, prehensile tail came by imagining an appendage for the busy tramway conductors the Marcinelle cartoonists often encountered on their way to work. This animal has become part of Belgian and French popular culture, and has spawned cartoons, a comic book series of its own, and merchandise. The cartoons have broadened its appeal to English-speaking countries.

André Franquin - The making of a master

By 1951, Franquin had found his style. His strip, which appeared every week on the first page of the Journal de Spirou, was a hit. Following Jijé's lead in the 1940s, Franquin coached a younger generation of cartoonists in the 1950s, notably Jean Roba, Jean de Maesmaker (Jidéhem) and Michel Régnier (Greg), who all worked with him on Spirou et Fantasio.

In 1955, following a contractual dispute with his publisher Dupuis, Franquin went for a short stint at Tintin, the concurrent magazine. This led to the creation of Modeste et Pompon, a gag series Franquin soon abandoned as he returned to Spirou. This series was later taken up by authors such as Dino Attanasio.

In 1957, Spirou chief editor Yvan Delporte gave Franquin the idea for an anti-hero, Gaston Lagaffe (from the French gaffe, meaning "blunder"). Initially a joke designed to fill up blank space in the magazine, the weekly strip, detailing the mishaps and madcap ideas and inventions of a terminally idle office boy working at the Spirou offices, took off and became one of Franquin's best-known creations.

However, Franquin soon suffered a period of depression, which forced him to stop drawing Spirou for a time. This happened between 1961 and 1963, in the middle of QRN sur Bretzelburg. During this time, he continued to draw Gaston despite ill health. In 1967, Franquin gave Spirou to a young cartoonist, Jean-Claude Fournier, and began to work full-time on his own creations.

Gaston gradually evolved from pure slapstick humor to feature themes important to Franquin, such as pacifism or ecology. Franquin worked on the strip until his death.

André Franquin - Franquin's later period

The 1960s saw a clear evolution in Franquin's style, which grew looser and more intricate. This graphical evolution would continue throughout the next decade. Soon, Franquin was considered a undisputed master of the art form, on par with the likes of Hergé (who on interview said he thought Franquin a far better cartoonist than himself), and his influence can be seen in the work of nearly every cartoonist hired by Spirou up until the end of the 1990s.

The last, and most radical, shift in Franquin's production happened in 1977, when he went through a nervous breakdown and began his Idées noires strip (lit. "Dark Thoughts"), first for the Spirou supplement, Le trombone illustré and later for Fluide Glacial. Idées noires concentrated on themes already seen in later Gaston strips, though here Franquin showed the darker, alarmed side of his nature. In one strip, a pair of flies are seen wandering a strange looking landscape, discussing the mistakes of their predecessors. In the final panel, we see the landscape is a city made from human skulls, and one fly responds: "Don't be too hard on them, they did leave us such splendid cities".

Proof of his popular and critical appeal, Franquin was awarded the very first Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême in 1974. Many books by Franquin have been published, a good number of which are considered classics of the genre. They have been translated in many languages. Several books have been written about Franquin, such as Numa Sadoul's Et Franquin créa la gaffe, an exhaustive interview with the artist covering his entire career.

Franquin's death in 1997 didn't quite elicit the kind of worldwide posthumous homage Hergé received. However, 2004 saw the first major museum retrospective of his work, an exhibit called Le monde de Franquin, in Paris' Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. In 2005, a nationwide Belgian survey elected him as the "16th greatest Belgian ever".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Biography", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki