Franquin is both a screenwriter and a designer, a complete man with an extraordinary creative spirit who will have marked the Belgian history of post-war comics; inventor of characters as improbable as Spirou, Fantasio, Modeste, Pompon, the indescribable Gaston Lagaffe, the surprising Marsupilami or even author of “Idées noirs” published in the supplement to Spirou’s journal, “le Trombone Illustrated”.
During his youth in Etterbeek, he developed his early talents by sketching scenes and creating caricatures of those around him. In college, he drew a little during classes but anyway, he wanted to become a designer, to the despair of his father who imagined him to be an agricultural engineer.
After a year of drawing lessons at the Saint-Luc school in Saint-Gilles, he joined CBA in 1944 as a cartoon animator at CBA, Compagnie Belge d’Actualités, a Belgian animation studio created by Paul Nagant. . During these years, he met Peyo, the creator of the Smurfs, and Morris, the father of Lucky Luke. It was the latter who introduced him to Jijé, designer of Spirou. In 1946, Jijé gave him the character, emblem of the eponymous weekly newspaper after a successful essay in the Almanac of 1947.
Lazy by nature, he creates his double and makes him a very unique antihero in the comic strip, Gaston Lagaffe, an unemployed character, a hoaxer who wanders through the pages of Spirou’s newspaper which appears on the front page on February 28, 1957. , and whose gags will be published every week until June 1991.
Gaston, the blunderer who knows how to blunder, wanders around the newspaper’s offices, sowing disorder and disrupting the smooth running of the editorial staff, sabotaging the realization of Mr. De Mesmaeker’s famous contracts. Gaston who invents musical instruments, who raises a mouse and a seagull in the editorial offices, who commits stupidity after stupidity but who makes people laugh, who relaxes and who brings good humor, who will quickly abandon his bow tie and his patent shoes to put on espadrilles and a big green turtleneck sweater.
Franquin’s genius is expressed in the signature adapted under each adventure board, an animated signature in correlation with the subject of the gag.
In 1974, he will be the first winner of the Angoulême Comic Strip Festival, returning to drawing Gaston in 1984. In 1987, there is the resounding return of Marsupilami. In 1992, Franquin sold his rights to a large part of his work to Marsu Productions, including Gaston, his monsters, and Idées noirs. However, he did not stop all work since he found himself in the spotlight in 1996, on the occasion of the release of Gaston’s album n°15.
“What is most striking about Franquin is the infinite complexity of his drawings. Over the course of reading and rereading, we discover a multitude of details that escape at first glance: the author has continued to add “gags within gags”, to use his expression. The reader can very well read his stories without stopping – the rhythm of narration, the suspense and the omnipresent humor are sufficient in themselves – but, if we take the time to linger, we discovers a number of “messages” written as watermarks in his plates, some of which are almost subliminal, which take us behind the scenes of the work… ”, Bob Garcia summarizes the life of André Franquin in the introduction to his very informative biographical work published by Éditions du Rocher.
