André Franquin

Biography

In September 1944, just after Belgium had been liberated, André Franquin walked into an animation studio and became an animator, though he had never been trained in the trade. The studio soon went bankrupt.

He was born on 3 January 1924 in Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels. His father worked in a bank and bred budgerigars, about two hundred of them by his son’s recollection; seriousness was prized so highly in the house that Franquin later spoke of an “enormous need to laugh” that had nowhere to go. He began drawing as a child, and at eleven he entered a competition run by the newspaper La Nation Belge at the 1935 World’s Fair in Brussels: his drawing, inspired by “Tintin in America”, was printed. His father had him earmarked to become an agricultural engineer, but with his mother’s help he got his way and in 1942 entered the Catholic art school of Saint-Luc. After a year he was bored there. When the school was closed because of the bombing, Eddy Paape, a former pupil, brought him to the studio Compagnie belge d’actualités, where Morris, the future creator of Lucky Luke, and Peyo, the future creator of the Smurfs, were already working. After the studio collapsed in 1945, the whole group found places with the publisher Dupuis: Morris was already contributing to its magazine Le Moustique, and through him Franquin began making covers and drawings for that magazine, as well as his first professional illustrations for the scouting magazine Plein Jeu. Joseph Gillain, known as Jijé, the lead artist of Spirou magazine, installed the young artists in his house in Waterloo; they worked in his bedroom. Together with Morris and Will, Franquin learned from Jijé. Their shared graphic style was later called the Marcinelle school, after the suburb of Charleroi where the publisher was based, though that is a view many hold rather than a settled fact.

From June 1946 Franquin was in charge of the series “Spirou et Fantasio”: Jijé left him a story that was only half drawn, “Spirou et la maison préfabriquée”. The handover from one artist to the other is almost invisible, because Franquin at first copied his teacher’s manner. Jijé, by Franquin’s own account, gave him above all the confidence that he was capable of making comics at all. In 1948 Franquin went with Jijé’s family to the United States and then to Mexico, continuing to send pages to Belgium; in the summer of 1949 he returned home. In 1950 he married Liliane Servais.

For almost twenty years afterwards he rebuilt the series. The stories grew longer and more complex, and a gallery of comic characters appeared: the Count of Champignac, the villain Zantafio, the journalist Seccotine. In “Spirou et les Héritiers” (1951–1952) the Marsupilami appeared for the first time, a creature from the imaginary country of Palombia with a very long prehensile tail. According to Franquin, the tail was suggested by the tram conductors of Brussels, whom he and his colleagues saw on their way to work. By 1951 his manner had settled, and the series on the front page of the magazine was a hit. He coached the next generation: Jean Roba and Jidéhem worked with him in the studio he set up in Brussels in the late 1950s.

In 1955, after a dispute over a contract, Franquin broke with Dupuis and went to the rival magazine Tintin. There he created the one-page gag series “Modeste et Pompon”; its scripts were written by Greg and later by René Goscinny. After a few months he made peace with Dupuis and returned, but his obligations to Tintin remained, and for a time he worked for both magazines. The series was later handed on to Dino Attanasio.

In 1957 the editor-in-chief of Spirou, Yvan Delporte, suggested a new character to him, Gaston Lagaffe, a hapless office boy at the magazine’s editorial office. It began as a joke to fill a blank space on a page, but the weekly strip caught on and became his best-known work. He liked turning the signature at the foot of a page into a gag.

In 1961–1963, from overwork and depression, Franquin interrupted work on the album “QRN sur Bretzelburg” for two years, but went on drawing the lighter “Gaston”. In 1967 he handed “Spirou et Fantasio” to Jean-Claude Fournier and turned entirely to his own series. In time themes that mattered to him came through in “Gaston”: pacifism and the protection of nature. In the 1960s his drawing became looser and more intricate. In the 1970s, too, his “Monsters” appeared, individual drawings of imaginary creatures.

In 1977, after another nervous breakdown, he began the series “Idées Noires”: black-and-white pages, first in “Le Trombone Illustré”, a supplement to Spirou, and later in Fluide Glacial. They deal with death, war, pollution, capital punishment, hunting and nuclear power; in one strip two flies wander through a city built of human skulls. From 1978 to 1986 he took part in creating the series “Isabelle”, named after his daughter.

Franquin received the Prix Saint-Michel in 1972 for “Gaston” and in 1981 for “Idées Noires”, and in 1974 he became the first winner of the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême. Hergé said of him: “Compared to him, I’m but a poor draftsman.” In 1991 he was made a Knight of the Order of Leopold. In 1987 the Marsupilami finally got a series of its own, in which Franquin acted as adviser to the artist Batem.

Franquin died on 5 January 1997 in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, in the south of France, two days after his seventy-third birthday. In 2004 the first major museum retrospective of his work, “Le monde de Franquin”, was held at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, and in 2017 an asteroid was named after him.