Gaston Lagaffe, a comic hero who hasn’t had an album since 1999, returns to bookstores Wednesday with a new cartoonist, Quebecois Delaf, whose critics praise his loyalty to Franquin.
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“The Return of Lagaffe”, the 22nd volume of the adventures of the Belgian hero, with 44 pages full of gags, is published by Dupuis Editions in a print run of 800,000 copies. That is a third less than the originally planned 1.2 million copies.
Delaf (real name Marc Delafontaine) is extremely loyal to the character’s creator, André Franquin, who died in 1997.
And for good reason: He began to systematically list all the attitudes and characteristics of Gaston and those around him, as well as their entire environment. Then he put him in new situations.
“I tried to add my touch. But I also wanted it to be gentle. When I re-read all the albums to prepare for it, I made my own specifications but also my wish list,” the author told RFI Radio.
AFP
Admirers will easily recognize the world of the newspaper made chaotic by Gaston’s legendary clumsiness and unconsciousness.
“I asked myself and also the publisher the question: Do we keep it in its golden age, the 60s, 70s (…) or do we transpose it into our years?” And I was uncomfortable with it in our years because Gaston is closely linked to Franquin and Franquin conveyed some of his criticism of society through Gaston,” Delaf continued.
Criticism of this choice is divided.
“We hadn’t seen Gaston for so long. We would have liked to know what he thinks today about social networks, emails, teleworking and artificial intelligence,” wrote Le Figaro.
This album “has everything you could expect from a success,” according to Le Parisien, for whom “the most difficult thing was undoubtedly finding the well-oiled mechanics of the gags on a page.”
ActuaBD, which was very skeptical about the project, came to the conclusion: “We expected worse.” “Gags that we really liked” give way to a second part in which “we laugh a little less,” the critic estimates Specialist page.
Isabelle Franquin, daughter of the series’ creator, who tried to prevent publication before giving in to the decision of an arbitrator, a Brussels lawyer, reiterated her disapproval.
“One thing that is certain and not subject to interpretation is the clear desire that my father personally expressed to me not to see Gaston survive under the pen of another designer,” she wrote in a press release two days before publication.