The Eye of Ina: Gaston Lagaffe, the “unemployed” who became a legendary hero

André Franquin was only truly happy when he was drawing. Concentration prevents him from smiling, but, usually allergic to television cameras, he accepted with happiness and enthusiasm, a participation in 1972, in Jean Frapat's show, Tac au Tac with Jean Roba and Claire Bretécher, that Madelen invites you to discover or rediscover. For him it was not a question of speaking, but of engaging in his favorite exercise: imagining a gag around a theme and making it happen straight away. The extract entitled “Be beautiful and shut up”, shows the dimension of his genius and a sense of the gag that has become a reflex. This master of comics will draw, in around thirty years, more than 900 Gaston Lagaffe gags.

He did not realize the dimension of this adventure when, in 1957, he went, as he did every week, to the office of Yvan Delporte, then editor-in-chief of the Spirou newspaper. After giving him two plates from the current episode, “The Mesozoic Traveler”, he talks to him about an idea that he finds amusing, and which came to his mind a few days earlier. Why not include, among the usual characters of the weekly, an unemployed hero? The green light is immediate. In the days that followed, Franquin produced a first sketch inspired by Snuffy Smith, an American comic book featuring a Mexican peasant, too lazy to work, decked out in a cap and a cigarette butt, permanently on the corner lips. In order to wink at one of his particularly blundering friends, Delporte suggests naming him Gaston.

This is how, for around ten weeks, Franquin and Delporte will have fun like crazy bringing this antihero into the pages of the newspaper. Each time, he provokes an incident, such as, for example, hiding a page by supposedly having himself photographed in front of it, just before it is printed. The two accomplices have no idea where they are going, and it is the enthusiastic readers who show them the path to follow. They write en masse to demand stories from Gaston. Franquin, overwhelmed by other activities, nevertheless finds time to draw a series of strips. Two months later, the demand was such that he began producing half-page gags. Seven years later, he will deliver one per week and thus gradually abandon his other series.

Also read: The return of Gaston Lagaffe: 24 years later, is he still as funny?

In the meantime, he has built a universe around a newsroom taken from his imagination. He has in fact never worked in an office and even less in those of the weekly newspaper that employs him. In 1968, passing the baton of the adventures of Spirou and Fantasio to Fournier, he made Léon Prunelle Gaston's hierarchical superior. Anxious to permanently expand this closed door, one evening he invents the character of Aimé de Mesmaeker, arriving with contracts that will never be signed. The name was not chosen at random: Jidéhem, who regularly works alongside him, is called Jean de Mesmaeker. A cat, a hedgehog, a turtle, birds and a goldfish, raised by Gaston, also regularly disrupt the daily life of the office. Franquin thus satisfies a passion for animals that he has cultivated since his early years when he raised white mice and collected a squirrel.

To this universe is added a car inspired by a Fiat 509, leaving the factories in 1927. From a photo found in a magazine of the time, he invented a model to which a clever handyman brought to life in the 70s. This is also the case with the Gaffophone. Unable to read the slightest musical note, he wrote down an instrument similar to the hurdy-gurdy, which later became a reality. To Franquin's amazement, a Dutch reader sent the newspaper a Gaffophone weighing 325 kilos by train!

Also read: Delaf: “For me, Gaston Lagaffe has something sacred”

Finally, invited to a fancy dress party, Gaston decides one day to ask a young lady from the office to accompany him. Because he rented a centaur costume, he chooses a secretary who has a ponytail. This is how the character of Mademoiselle Jeanne was born. In Franquin's mind, he will disappear the day after the party. The beginning of a love story that legend assures is platonic. She is even more beautiful.