| Spirou | |
|---|---|
 Spirou No. 1 (21 April 1938) Front cover byRob-Vel. | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Dupuis |
| Schedule | Weekly |
| Publication date | 21 April 1938 – present |
| Main character | Spirou |
Spirou[a] (French:Le Journal de Spirou) is a weeklyBelgian comics magazine published by theDupuis company since April 21, 1938. It is an anthology magazine with new features appearing regularly, containing a mix of short humor strips andserialized features, of which the most popular series would be collected asalbums by Dupuis afterwards.
With the success of the weekly magazineLe Journal de Mickey in France, and the popularity of the weeklyAdventures of Tintin inLe Petit Vingtième, many new comic magazines or youth magazines with comics appeared in France and Belgium in the second half of the 1930s.[1][2] In 1936, the experienced publisherJean Dupuis put his sons Paul and the 19-year-old Charles in charge of a new magazine aimed at the juvenile market.[3][4]
First appearing 21 April 1938, it was a large format magazine, available only inFrench and only inWallonia. It was a sixteen-page weekly comics magazine composed of a mixture of short stories and gags,serial comics and short articles. It introduced two new comics, the eponymousSpirou drawn by the young FrenchmanRob-Vel, andLes Aventures de Tif (later to becomeTif et Tondu) written and drawn byFernand Dineur, and printed American comics such asSuperman,Red Ryder andBrick Bradford.[3] On 27 October 1938 theFlemish edition namedRobbedoes appeared as well.[5]
Spirou andRobbedoes 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 forPetits Belges and used the pen nameJijé. Together with Dineur andSirius (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 period 1945–1960 has been described by critics as the golden age ofSpirou magazine and of Belgian comics in general, partly incited by the 1946 appearance of the successful competitorTintin 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 andMorris; known as the "Bande à quatre", "Gang of four", they began laying the foundation for theMarcinelle school that marked the magazine for decades.
In 1946 and 1947, the team was joined by some of the main contributors toSpirou for the next decades, includingVictor Hubinon,Jean-Michel Charlier andEddy Paape. After a few years, these artists started their now classic series likeBuck Danny by Hubinon and Charlier andLucky Luke by Morris, while Franquin took overSpirou 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 appointedYvan Delporte to that position, so he could himself focus on his increasing interest in the publication of the magazine's series' albums.[1]
The golden ages culminated in the 1950s with the introduction of more authors and series likePeyo (Johan and Peewit in 1952,The Smurfs in 1958),René Follet,Marcel Remacle,Jean Roba (withBoule et Bill),Maurice Tillieux (withGil Jourdan) andMitacq. In 1954, Jijé created the realistic western comicJerry Spring, and in 1957 Franquin introduced the anti-heroGaston Lagaffe. The authors of the magazine, many of them pupils of Jijé, were grouped stylistically in the Marcinelle school, the counterpart ofligne claire exhibited by the artists grouped aroundHergé inTintin magazine (the main competitor forSpirou).
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 asalbums 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.
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 likePilote. 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, likeBerck, had trouble filling the void.
Around 1959–1960, the firstmini-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 includeThe Smurfs byPeyo,Bobo byRosy andDeliège,Flagada byDegotte among many others.
Only in the early 1970s, did a number of new success series and authors emerge. The main contributor for the next decades wasRaoul Cauvin, a lithographer who worked as a cameraman for the Dupuis animation studios and wrote stories for series likeMusti. He became the main story writer for Dupuis, with major series likeSammy with Berck,Les Tuniques Bleues withLambil, and laterCédric withLaudec andAgent 212 withDaniel Kox, among many others. Other important new authors wereFrançois Walthery withNatacha andRoger Leloup withYoko Tsuno, together withIsabelle 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 supplementLe Trombone Illustré, which appeared insideSpirou for thirty weeks, and showcased new artists likeDidier Comès,Enki Bilal,Claire Bretécher,F'murr,Grzegorz Rosinski, andFrédéric Jannin, next to more established authors likeRené Hausman, Peyo, Roba,Gotlib, and Franquin, who started his third major series,Idées Noires.
The early 1980s hadSpirou andRobbedoes searching for a new, appealing identity, with new formulas, more adult comics likeXIII byWilliam Vance andJean Van Hamme orJeremiah byHermann. Most artists of the first generation were no longer active, and the productivity of many artists of the second generation slowed down as well. New talents wereTome andJanry, the new team for theSpirou et Fantasio comic,Bruno Gazzotti (Soda),François Gilson (Mélusine),Bercovici,Zidrou,André Geerts,Bernard Hislaire,Midam (Kid Paddle),Frank Pé,Marc Hardy andLuc Cromheecke.
Robbedoes had a severe reduction in the number of readers, and was first reduced to 32 pages (withSpirou growing to 68), before it finally disappeared in 2005.
From the very start,Spirou andRobbedoes published collections of 10 to 13 consecutive magazines in hardcover format - originally quarterly, but more frequently with the increased page number of the magazine. This series still continues forSpirou with 384 volumes as of July 2025.
Since the 1940s,Spirou was in constant competition withTintin magazine. If one artist was published by one of the magazines, he would not be published by the other one. This was a gentleman's agreement between the two publishers,Raymond Leblanc ofLe Lombard andCharles Dupuis ofDupuis. One notable exception wasAndré Franquin, who in 1955, after a dispute with its editor, moved from the more popularSpirou toTintin.[6] The dispute was quickly settled, but Franquin had signed an agreement withTintin for five years. He createdModeste et Pompon forTintin while pursuing work forSpirou. He quitTintin at the end of his contract. Some artists moved fromSpirou toTintin likeEddy Paape andLiliane & Fred Funcken, while some went fromTintin toSpirou likeRaymond Macherot andBerck.
The target audience is between 9 and 16 years, although the magazine appeals to many adults as well. Over the years,Spirou has undergone a few format changes and gradually became thicker, eventually averaging 68 pages. It was distributed in most French and Dutch speaking countries, and for some years, editions in other languages appeared as well (notably in Spain and Portugal).
A few pages, apart from the comics and the advertising, are always put aside for text contents and interaction with the readers (games, letters, jokes, etc.). Often a general theme is used to give the magazine some unity instead of being just a collection of unrelated comics, and this also gets reflected in thelayout.
Along withTintin magazine (founded in 1946), it was considered the home of theFranco-Belgian comics school until the seventies, when its importance declined. Still in publication, Spirou sells some 100,000 copies every week (as of 2009).[7]Robbedoes was eventually shelved in September 2005, after more than 3500 weekly publications.
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