Thunderbolt in Angoulême: Gaston Lagaffe is back. Created sixty-five years ago by André Franquin (1924-1997), the hero in espadrilles is preparing to live new gags, is to announce, Thursday, March 17, the Dupuis publishing house, on the sidelines of the International Festival of comics. Like Tintin, whom Hergé (1907-1983) did not want to see survive his disappearance, Gaston has always had the reputation of being impossible to revive, too close a closeness uniting him to his creator, who died in 1997. Owner of the character since 2013, Dupuis is counting on a second editorial career for him, on the model of many other phoenixes of the 9e art (Astérix, Lucky Luke, Corto Maltese, Blake et Mortimer…).
His new “interpreter” is the Canadian Marc Delafontaine, alias Delaf, 48, the designer of Nombrils, a flagship series of the magazine Spirou. Nine years ago, Delaf had made a Gaston gag in a collective tribute book, The Gallery of the Illustrious (Dupuis, 2013). His mastery of the Franquin style had then amazed the purists and awakened, in Dupuis, the fantasy of seeing Lagaffe return to service under another brush.
singular method
The Quebecer started working on the project in 2018 by developing a unique method consisting of dissecting the 900 gags of the original series. He tagged each thumbnail with keywords: Gaston sleeping, Gaston walking down the street, De Mesmaeker angry, Prunelle on the verge of a nervous breakdown… With hundreds of entries, this database then helped the designer to “immerse himself” mentally in Franquin’s brain and to sink his hand into his.
Similar to those of the revivals of Asterix (by Ferri and Conrad) or Lucky Luke (by Jul and Achdé), this enterprise of “identical reproduction” has only one goal: to revitalize the character and the sales of a catalog that is dwindling, for lack of novelties. The publishing house is aiming very high: expected in October, the first album of this new series, The Return of Lagaffe, will be printed in 1.2 million copies. If Delaf keeps pace, a new title will then be published every two years, alternating with Asterix. Something to delight all booksellers in France.
But also disconcerting pure and hard aesthetes, for whom Lagaffe must rest in peace. The problem, explains the World Julien Papelier, the president of Dupuis, is that “Iconic comic book characters, like Gaston, are threatened with extinction if they are not reincarnated in one way or another”. An internal study carried out by Dupuis would show that “Gaston’s notoriety among the youngest” decreased by a third between 2013 and 2017.
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