Spirou (magazine)

''Spirou'' (french: Le Journal de Spirou) is a weekly Franco-Belgian comics magazine published by the Dupuis company since April 21, 1938. It's an anthology magazine with new features appearing regularly, containing a mix of short humor strips and serialized features, of which the most popular series would be collected as albums by Dupuis afterwards.

History

Creation

With the success of the weekly magazine ''Le Journal de Mickey'' in France, and the popularity of the weekly ''Adventures of Tintin'' in ''Le Petit Vingtième'', many new comic magazines or youth magazines with comics appeared in France and Belgium in the second half of the 1930s. In 1936, the experienced publisher Jean Dupuis put his sons Paul and the 19-year-old Charles in charge of a new magazine aimed at the juvenile market.

First appearing 21 April 1938, it was a large format magazine, available only in French and only in Wallonia. It was an eight-page weekly comics magazine composed of a mixture of short stories and gags, serial comics and short articles. It introduced two new comics, the eponymous '' Spirou'' drawn by the young Frenchman Rob-Vel, and ''Les Aventures de Tif'' (later to become ''Tif et Tondu'') written and drawn by Fernand Dineur, and printed American comics such as ''Superman'', ''Red Ryder'' and ''Brick Bradford''. On 27 October 1938 the Flemish edition named ''Robbedoes'' appeared as well.

Second World War

''Spirou'' and ''Robbedoes'' soon became very popular and the magazine doubled its pages from 8 to 16. After the invasion of the Germans, the magazine gradually had to stop publishing American comics. They were at first continued by local artists and later replaced with new series. When Rob-Vel no longer had the possibility to send his pages from France to Belgium on a regular basis either, his series was continued by Joseph Gillain, a young artist who had previously worked for ''Petits Belges'' and used the pen name Jijé. Together with Dineur and Sirius (pen name of Max Mayeu), they filled the magazine with a number of new series and increased the popularity of it even further.

Near the end of the war, due to paper shortages, publication had to be stopped anyway, with only a few irregular almanacs to keep the bond with the readers intact and to provide work for the personnel to prevent them being deported to Germany.

The golden years

The period 1945–1960 has been described by critics as the golden age of ''Spirou'' magazine and of Belgian comics in general, partly incited by the 1946 appearance of the successful competitor ''Tintin'' magazine. ''Spirou'' resumed publication only weeks after Belgium was liberated, but now on a much smaller format. Jijé was the main author, providing pages from multiple series each week. Some American comics reappeared as well. Jijé started out a studio, where he schooled three talented apprentices, Will, André Franquin and Morris; known as the "Bande à quatre", "Gang of four", they began laying the foundation for the Marcinelle school that marked the magazine for decades.

In 1946 and 1947, the team was joined by some of the main contributors to ''Spirou'' for the next decades, including Victor Hubinon, Jean-Michel Charlier and Eddy Paape. After a few years, these artists started their now classic series like ''Buck Danny'' by Hubinon and Charlier and ''Lucky Luke'' by Morris, while Franquin took over ''Spirou'' from Jijé. Gradually, the American comics and reprints were replaced by new, European productions, and by the 50s, nearly all the content was made especially for the magazine. Charles Dupuis remained editor-in-chief of the magazine until 1955 when he appointed Yvan Delporte to that position, so he could himself focus on his increasing interest in the publication of the magazine's series' albums.

The golden ages culminated in the 1950s with the introduction of more authors and series like Peyo ('' Johan and Peewit'' in 1952, ''The Smurfs'' in 1958), René Follet, Marcel Remacle, Jean Roba (with ''Boule et Bill''), Maurice Tillieux (with ''Gil Jourdan'') and Mitacq. In 1954, Jijé created the realistic western comic ''Jerry Spring'', and in 1957 Franquin introduced the anti-hero ''Gaston Lagaffe''. The authors of the magazine, many of them pupils of Jijé, were grouped stylistically in the Marcinelle school, the counterpart of ligne claire exhibited by the artists grouped around Hergé in ''Tintin'' magazine (the main competitor for ''Spirou'').

By 1960, the magazine had achieved a fixed structure and had grown to 52 pages, mainly filled with new, European (mainly Belgian) comics, coupled with some text pages (interaction with the readers) and adverts. Most of the comics were long-running series which were regularly published as albums of 44 or 64 pages, generating a constant source of revenue for the artists and the publisher. In the next decades, the sales of albums would become the main focus, reducing the importance of the magazine which became more of a breeding ground for new talent and series.

Rejuvenation in the 1960s and 1970s

In the early 1960s, the main changes were the strong editorial work of Delporte, who kept the magazine vibrant despite the more or less fixed series, with numerous supplements, games, and experimental layouts. The magazine demonstrated the pleasure that had gone in creating it, and maintained a strong reader base despite the growing competition from more adolescent and adult French magazines like ''Pilote''. Some of the main authors (Jijé, Franquin, Will, and Hubinon) temporarily started working for other magazines, with Morris the only major name who definitely left the magazine. Their replacements, like Berck, had trouble filling the void.

Around 1959–1960, the first ''mini-récits'' (lit. mini-stories) appeared. This was an experiment in which the middle pages of the magazines could be removed, which the reader (armed with a pair of scissors, a stapler and some patience) could fold into a small comics magazine of its own. Several artists were allowed to hone their skills inside these mini-récits before moving on to larger pages, and until the 1970s, more than 500 mini-récits were produced, series that debuted in this format include ''The Smurfs'' by Peyo, ''Bobo'' by Rosy and Deliège, '' Flagada'' by Degotte among many others.

Only in the early 1970s a number of new success series and authors appeared . The main contributor for the next decades was Raoul Cauvin, a lithographer who worked as a cameraman for the Dupuis animation studios and wrote stories for series like '' Musti''. He became the main story writer for Dupuis, with major series like ''Sammy'' with Berck, ''Les Tuniques Bleues'' with Lambil, and later '' Cédric'' with Laudec and ''Agent 212'' with Daniel Kox, among many others. Other important new authors were François Walthery with '' Natacha'' and Roger Leloup with ''Yoko Tsuno'', together with '' Isabelle'' by Will evidence of the new wave of adventurous female-oriented comics of the decade.

A commercial failure but artistic success came along in 1977, when Delporte created the more adult supplement '' Le Trombone Illustré'', which appeared inside ''Spirou'' for thirty weeks, and showcased new artists like Didier Comès, Enki Bilal, Claire Bretécher

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