Franquin was born on January the 3rd, 1924, in Etterbeek, a district of Brussels. He was obviously a gifted drawer from his earliest years: he always wanted to be a drawer, he drew everything he saw, and thanks to the blackboard he received as a gift, he was able to develop this talent. This is a picture of one of these drawings, dated February the 4th, 1929. Why could we pick up the trail of this drawing? Because André's father was so impressed by it that he cleaned it, wrote the name and the date, and brought it to the photographer's in order to immortalize this work.
Nevertheless this father never did anything to encourage his son in his beginning career as a drawer. He was a banker, and wanted André to become an agronomist because he couldn't do it himself. Besides André's father had quite unpleasant beliefs, pro-fascist, rexist and anti-semitic ones, at least before WWII, i.e. at a time when these monstrous theories hadn't been put into practice yet, and when everyone (or almost everyone…) wasn't aware of what they really mean. So in the thirties, the Franquin family read La nation belge (The Belgian nation), the newspaper of the self-righteous Walloon right wing, which however had the merit of letting children take part to its special pages for the Brussels International Exhibition in 1935. The newspaper asked its young readers to send reports illustrated by their drawings, and the young André really had a huge success, with articles published every week and praises from the Nation's editor.
| On the left side, you can see the very first drawing published: an Indian, as the caption usefully indicates. These copies are really of bad quality but they come from old newspapers whose printing was originally quite poor. |  |
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And this is a budgerigar at a bird seller's André's father was a regular client of. |
| There were a lot of animals at Franquin's home indeed: the father's hobby was ornithology, he bred hundreds of birds. Apart from that, their home was always full of various small animals, such as squirrels, cats, mouses, and also served as a clinic for lame blackbirds… no wonder that Franquin always put a lot of animals in his comics! And his family probably faced this kind of problem often… ® |  (Le cas Lagaffe, The Lagaffe case, page 12) |
Franquin's first memories about comics went back to this time, when he was devouring the American strips of Opera Mundi's magazines such as Robinson, Hop-là! (Oops!) and above all Le Journal de Mickey (Mickey's Magazine), published in French by Hachette. Disney certainly was Franquin's first major influence, who even said: « I learned to draw by reading American stories, like almost all the guys of my generation »1. One of the most famous expressions of this influence is a sequence in Les chapeaux noirs (The black hats, 1950), the one of the cactus falling on the gangster, which was completely (but inconsciously!) copied on a Disney gag.
André's father was a drawer too: he was creating cover drawings for the newsletter of his ornithology club. But that wasn't making him look approvingly on his son's aspirations. Fortunately, André's mother and his neighbors managed to sway the father from his course (or rather to make him give up his control on his son's destiny), and that's how Franquin ended up at the Saint-Luc drawing school in Brussels, at the end of 1942, after his humanities (the high school in Belgium)2.
However that may be, Saint-Luc taught Franquin his first technical rudiments. His professors observed he had no gift for religious imagery, so they appointed him to do the illustration of La Fontaine's Tales; unfortunately there is no part of this early work remaining nowadays. He drew from life too: nude (men of course!), sculpture, still life. What he learnt was useful all through his career: « I did nothing useless at Saint-Luc, that's obvious »4, he said.
In 1941, he struck up a friendship with his young neighbor Liliane: « We were attracted to each other as soon as we met »5. These drawings were made in 1943, André was still a student at Saint-Luc.
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But war raged. Franquin and his fellow students of Saint-Luc were quite privileged, because the German occupying forces looked on this school favorably (the rexist, pro-fascist Léon Degrelle made a lot of speeches there before the war). So they benefited from various favors which eased the restrictions, and above all exempted them from the compulsory work service, which sent young men of the occupied territories working in Germany. But these favors didn't protect them from shellings, and the German V1 fell on Brussels in 1944. In order to prevent a slaughter in case of a bombardment on the school, it closed temporarily 6.
So these events made Franquin leave Saint-Luc. Without any plans: he lived with his parents and « spent his time sleeping »7… But other people took decisions for him. At Saint-Luc he met a student at the end of his scholarship, Édouard Paape (better known as Eddy Paape for comics fans),
who was working since 1942 at the same time as an animator for a small clandestine cartoon studio of the Resistance at Liège, Paul Nagant's CBA (Compagnie Belge d'Actualités, Belgian News Company). CBA moved to Brussels after the Liberation, in September 1944, because the premises in Liège were destroyed by fire, and looked for new contributors in order to boost the production. Paape (on the right) remembered André's drawings at Saint-Luc, and he had the idea of recommending him to his boss. That's how Franquin got hired as an assistant animator at CBA, where he met Maurice de Bevere, aka Morris, the future creator of Lucky Luke, as well as Georges Salmon, a journalist and inveterate handyman (who chose to shorten his first name as did Paape, and became Geo Salmon). Shortly after Franquin, Pierre Culliford joined the team too: he was famous later by the name of Peyo, thanks to his small Schtroumpfs (Smurfs in English)… So five future major artists of the publishing house Dupuis happened to work together in a cartoon studio in Brussels at he end of 1944!
 Franquin by himself |
 Morris by himself |
 Geo Salmon by Franquin |
 Peyo by Walthéry |
But it's quite strange because you don't just become a cartoon animator overnight. « So I was an animator, which was absurd because no one explained anything to me, and I wasn't clever enough to understand the system of the 12 or 24 images per second alone. The only animation I ever made showed at an incredible speed! »8, Franquin said. In addition to the animations, he also made series of fixed images for projectors, such as the short story of an alarm clock, trying to wake a deeply sleeping character up. This is the only work of this kind of which we got a reliable mention, but unfortunately no material trail of the approximate 40 drawings of the series. This sequence reminds us of the beginning of "L'héritage" ("The heritage", 1946 i.e. two years later).
The caricature style in Plein-Jeu… ® … and the realistic style, much more martial. ¯
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It may be difficult to imagine what Franquin's realistic style is: only his humorous works are known, and he rarely drew in another way. You'll find most of his realistic drawings in Plein-Jeu (here above, on the left, and here another example), and afterwards for Dupuis Publishing (which played a major role in André's career: I didn't want to include a long history of Dupuis in the main text so I made it in a separate page that you can read by clicking here) in its other magazines such as Les Bonnes Soirées (The Good Evenings). And these drawings won't appear after the early fifties anymore. However Franquin made realistic drawings all his career long, but most of them weren't published (a good example here).
Anyway, since Franquin studied at Saint-Luc, he had always been able to make realistic drawings: « If you were patient enough, I could make a very lifelike portrait of you, almost like a photograph. »11 Just like this one. But this style was never used in any comics series, in any published work, and Franquin has an explanation: « I'm good at the lifelike style but I'm like a kind of camera without a lens: I draw exactly what I see. So even if I find this skill very funny, I couldn't use it to develop a realistic style. […] That's probably why I never created any realistic series… »12
But let's come back to Plein-Jeu. There is an important fact about Franquin's contribution to the magazine: he didn't just give his drawings, he also discovered from the inside what a magazine was, how its editorial department worked, and how an enthusiastic and inventive guy like Schellens managed with little money to make every issue live and find new things for its readers. Soon André began to take part in this task, to be involved in the editorial content of the magazine, as he made 10 years after with Yvan Delporte at the head of the editorial department of Spirou's magazine!
Plein-Jeu is not the only scout magazine Franquin contributed to: the fact he knew Schellens made him draw for Carrefour des routiers (Rovers' Crossroads: a "rover", in this context, is a young adult scout), at Christmas 1944, so even before the beginning of his work for Plein-Jeu. And again at Christmas 1945: he drew this cover.
These first works, religious scenes, moralizing cartoons in praise of the clergy, seem to be paradoxical today… As I told you before, Franquin gradually became a fierce opponent of religion and of all its alienations after this time. However he had such a pleasant memory of his collaboration with Schellens that he continued working more or less regularly during his career with scout movements, and first of all with the Fédération des Scouts Catholiques de Belgique (Federation of the Catholic Scouts of Belgium), which was at this time publishing Plein-Jeu.
But we don't forget that André, as he began working for Plein-Jeu, was still employed at CBA. But not for long: after the Liberation, American productions came back massively to Europe and the local cartoon studios didn't resist much. CBA went bankrupt. But in spite of what some people said, including Franquin himself 13, the latter didn't become jobless at this time: he had his contract with Plein-Jeu and lived at his parents 14, so he didn't have any real financial worries. But his very strong desire to draw encouraged him to find a new job…
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