7 - Franquin

Franquin ANDRÉ FRANQUIN SPIROU AND FANTASIO HS01 - The Legacy, Dupuis 1976 Original cover. Signed. India ink and blue pencil on paper 25.5 × 36.5 cm (10.04 × 14.37 in.) In 1973, RTP Editions—a publishing imprint spun off from the fanzine *Ran Tan Plan*, edited by André Leborgne—published Franquin’s *Spirou and Fantasio* album, a collection of the earliest *Spirou* comic strips drawn by the creator of the Marsupilami. This was the first time these strips had been republished in an album since 1948. At that time, Dupuis Publishing paid little attention to its heritage or its original typefaces. This initiative reignited interest in the original works, and soon Michel Deligne, Futuropolis, and Magic Strip began mass-producing these reissues. A new culture had just been born. This bothered Charles Dupuis, owner of the character and the brand, who didn’t like seeing his properties scattered about a bit too much… At the suggestion of Thierry Martens, alias “Monsieur Archives,” he launched a collection titled “Péchés de jeunesse” (Youthful Sins), whose inaugural publication is this album, *L’Héritage* (The Legacy), which features Franquin’s earliest drawings of the bellboy. He did so with all the more enthusiasm given that the creator of Gaston had stopped drawing the character more than ten years earlier. For the cover illustration, Franquin revisited a scene he had previously used on the cover of the *Spirou* collection No. 23 in 1947, but he couldn’t bring himself to plagiarize his own work; that “old style” no longer suited him. Consequently, for this new drawing, he changed the angle, lengthened the perspective, added a gag, and—with the virtuosity of a genius at the height of his art—used Gaston Lagaffe’s energetic linework to make the crocodiles’ smiles even more delightful as they awaited their feast. It is simply sublime. Sales of *Péchés de jeunesse* exceeded 100,000 copies, which sounded the death knell for small Franco-Belgian classics imprints, as major publishers had by then realized the value of preserving their heritage. Didier Pasamonik