Spirou Journal Celebrates Franquin and Morris at 100 [Issue #4474]

Spirou Journal does double-sized issues every now and then. There’s always one for the summer vacation season and one in December for the Christmas. There’s probably more, but those are the issues I can name off the top of my head.

This year, though, the publishing schedule begins with a bang: a double issue with a cover date of January 3, 2024. These are issues 4473 and 4474.

The first one is your typical issue with a 56 page mix of serialized and standalone stories, interviews, and game pages.

But, then, bolted onto the back of that issue is a second issue running 42 pages. It starts with a new cover. The theme of this one is celebrating the hundredth birthdays of BD masters/legends Andre Franquin and Morris. (See also: The new Franquin stamp!)

Hard to believe, but the two were born only a month apart — Morris in December 1923 and Franquin in January 1924. Their impact on Spirou Journal and the world of BD continues to this day, though.

There’s no simple analogy to American comics here. I think I referred to Franquin once as the Jack Kirby of Europe. That works in the way that so many people emulated his style, but not necessarily in the volume or diversity of output. Franquin worked on a relatively small handful of projects over the course of his career. It adds up to a lot of work, but nowhere near the pages or characters of Kirby. The stuff he created, however, is well-known and loved in Belgium and France to this day.

Morris wound up doing Lucky Luke for this whole life. He tried a couple of other things along the way, but nothing really clicked. Luke was more than enough to keep him busy.

Franquin wrote and drew Spirou stories for 20 years, and it feels like modern artists are still working through the plots and characters he did in those comics to this day. That reminds me of the X-Men, where anytime a new creative team comes on board, they inevitably cycle through the Magneto/Savage Land/Hellfire Club/Shiar Empire circuit that every X-team wants to do.

Dedicating this issue of Spirou Journal to Franquin and Morris together is a wonderful tribute. It also gives a few artists and writers the chance to devise ways of using the two in the comics, themselves.

I won’t go through all of them, but here are a few highlights:

The Tributes

The issue starts with a one-pager depicting the day Franquin met Morris at the Belgian animation studio they worked together at. It’s a very cute story done in a cartoony and attractive style. To what degree it’s true, I have no idea.

Morris is at his drawing table, being bothered by a mosquito he tries desperately to swat away. Franquin is amused at this and draws the scene. The two bond over the moment and go to work alongside each other (though rarely together) for many years to come.

They also worked on the side for a weekly magazine called “Le Moustique,” which is French for “The Mosquito.” Not a coincidence to the story, I’m sure.

Yoann writes and draws a two-pager where Spirou and Lucky Luke have to team up to take down a bad guy. It doesn’t quite work out the way you’d expect it to, at all. It’s great fun to see Yoann drawing Lucky Luke. (He looks like a Doug TenNapel character, interestingly enough.) He even incorporates the classic Lucky Luke solid color background style to great effect. This story is colored as flat as can be done, and that works.

I enjoyed what I’ve read of Yoann’s Spirou work so far, and always keep an eye out for his work. (See also “Captainz.“)

There’s a two page Marsupilami story set in a traveling circus that includes two familiar looking figures at work. It’s done by the creative team of the Marsupilami series: writer Ced, artist Batem, and colorist Cerise.

Morris, of course, turns out to be quite the sharpshooter. He mentions in the story that he learned to shoot from the best. Naturally.

Bouzard contributes an autobiographical four pager about his angst over an assignment to draw a Lucky Luke story. Mostly, he’s worried about how to draw Jolly Jumper. When the ghost of Morris visits him, though, he’s more concerned with how Morris got in than in learning from him. That one page with Morris might just be the funniest page in the entire magazine this week.

A quick and dirty translation of the two panels above:

Morris: I am the cartoonist of Lucky Luke!

Bouzard: How did you get in here?

Morris: Not important! I just wanted to tell you about your horses…

Bouzard: Do you have keys?

It’s a hilarious slow burn of two people talking past each other.

Imbattable/Mr. Invincible creator, Pascal Jousselin, has a beautiful three page story about everything he learned from Lucky Luke as a kid. He draws the kid version of himself walking alongside Lucky Luke, talking about all the vocabulary words he learned from reading the series, and how it introduced him to the Far West to begin with. Along the way, you get a bunch of cameo appearances from memorable Lucky Luke characters.

And then there’s a little twist at the end and a great cameo from outside the Spirou-verse at the end.

The issue finished up with a four page extract from the upcoming autobiographical book, “Auteur de BD… Je Reve!”, by Fournier. He’s the guy who followed Franquin on Spirou. The story here is of the time he flew with Morris. It looks great and the book is out in May. I know there won’t be an English translation of it, but I’m a little obsessed with the history of BD these days, so this is the kind of book I’d struggle through with my relatively low French fluency level…

And More!

Sprinkled through these stories is an article covering the careers of Franquin and Morris, well-illustrated and covering all the highlights. It doesn’t directly cover the time Franquin sued Disney and won, but I’ll happily fill in that gap for them.

For people new to the history of BD or just for the younger readers of Spirou Journal, it’s a nice primer to get them interested in two very interesting and successful creators. I’ll talk about this more in a future article, but there’s always a nice awareness of Spirou Journal’s history and traditions in the magazine throughout the years. This issue is a nice continuation of that.

I only wish that this had been the main cover of the issue and the lead, instead of the backup, Beggars can’t be choosers, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed this one no matter the order.