The story begins with a conflict. Franquin, like the other authors of Dupuis at the time, signed a contract for every album, and wasn't bound by an overall contract. For one of his albums ¹, the financial director of Dupuis Publishing (maybe Mr Boulier? ) had cunningly modified the author's payment clause. At first sight, one could believe that this change would have almost no consequences, which anyway would have been compensated by a higher print run. André, who wasn't used to the subtleties of the business world, signed this contract. But the album had a normal print run; and as he complained, his publisher just denied having promised more.

Towering rage of Franquin, resignation letter, and offer of services to the "natural" competitor, the great professional and personal rival of Charles Dupuis: Raymond Leblanc, the founder of Lombard Publishing, the publisher of Tintin magazine!

Charles Dupuis

Raymond Leblanc

Indeed, in spite of the courteousness which goes without saying between colleagues, these two men, having the same background and the same ambition, were involved in a cut-throat competition, even beyond the professional aspects. If we are to believe the late Greg who knew both of them well, « Charles Dupuis had become pathologically obsessed with Raymond Leblanc »². So Franquin's choice in order to get his "revenge" for Dupuis' dirty trick was easy: to go and knock on the door of Lombard Street's editorial office. In other words, as the creator of Achille Talon also said, « Franquin created "Modeste" only to get up Dupuis' nose »³!

Still, André prepared his offer of services well: « Concerning the personality of the characters, I thought that out according to the magazine's tendencies so as to prepare a nearly tailor-made series for these people. »⁴. It's important to remind that the magazines Spirou and Tintin, as their title roles (and the drawers of the latters!), have very different personalities, even if both remain in the limits of christian morality: the former is "funny", a little bit rascal, more inclined to humor, and the latter is "serious", educational with a majority of realistic series. And the "serious" Tintin could sometimes seem too austere: thus the coming of a "comic" into the team was welcome, provided that he would not depart too much from the official rules!

Modeste and Pompon

So Franquin has "clean" characters to propose to the magazine's management, including André Fernez, the editorial director 5. As you can imagine even if you don't speak French, "Modeste" means "modest" and is a real, though rare first name. "Pompon" means "bobble" which isn't a real French first name, it's just emphasizing her hairstyle. They're "tidy petits-bourgeois" 6 who of course are purely friends and not engaged to each other. By the way, you can notice the perfect verticality of Pompon's chest, although Seccotine had been given discreet, yet more realistic curves three years before in "Spirou".

However in the meantime, Franquin found the contract he and the financial director of Dupuis Publishing signed, the one which mentioned the increased print run. Then his memories vary a little bit with the information sources: things probably have returned to normal by themselves ⁷, but one also can read ⁸ that "Mr Boulier" kept repudiating the contract even with it under his nose, and that eventually Charles Dupuis himself had to intervene and bring his protégé back to the fold. That created a big problem for André: he was bound by a 5-year agreement to the Lombard, so he had to work for two publishers at the same time, delivering the "Modeste" pages to one and the "Spirou" pages to the other (and also the "Gaston" pages from 1957, but let's not think too far ahead).

That's why he almost immediatly called on a scriptwriter for his "Modeste et Pompon" gags... who was no other than Greg! Five years before, as he was a young beginner, he visited Franquin in order to show him his first drawn pages. But Greg has always been more of a scriptwriter than of a drawer, so he felicitously could adopt "Modeste and Pompon"'s world, which was colored and spiced up by the variety of the minor characters, as in Spirou.

The major minor character: Félix. He appears sometimes as a friend, sometimes as a cousin of Modeste 9. He's a sales rep for about every possible thing and a real pain in the backside for his acquaintances. An inventor and blunderer, he's a kind of draft for Gaston Lagaffe.

The three nephews of Félix are also a reliable source of gags. Those little pranksters also have a doubtful family relationship and they first were five, then four, and finally three, probably to make the drawing easier. Usually they're dressed in blue, white and red, and the only thing we know about their names is that one of them is called Dédé 10.

Modeste's two neighbors: on the left, Mr Ducrin ("horsehair"), an irascible tax man 11, and on the right, Mr Dubruit ("noisy"), as round as Ducrin is lean, often jovial but always troublesome and intrusive with his large family. Ducrin has been created by Greg and Dubruit by Goscinny, and both men never met.

Other characters created by Greg: Symphorien, the countryman and uncle of Modeste, and his pet rooster Jules. They live in a village called Mangetout-sur-Tuteur, ie "string bean on its stake"…

Another recurrent character is a baby, the one of a mysterious cousin Améthyste that we've never seen, but who gives Franquin an excuse to draw a baby, whose model is no other than his own daughter, Isabelle, born in February 1957… exactly one week before Gaston.

One of the most interesting features of the series is its "fifties" atmosphere. "Modeste et Pompon" may be among the works of Franquin the one with the deepest roots in its time ¹², and it's a family comedy, some kind of theater and not an adventure movie as "Spirou" already was at this time. Therefore, the scenery has a great importance and Franquin takes particular care about it, making it rich and coherent.

Above I mentioned the name of Goscinny: even if Greg was the scriptwriter number one for "Modeste et Pompon" (except Franquin himself, of course), other stars of the world of comics contributed too, such as Goscinny indeed, and, to a lower extent, Peyo, Tibet or Craenhals.

However, and in spite of the helps of his scriptwriters, Franquin was suffering from having two employers, because of the overproduction this situation required, and because of the permanent drama with Charles Dupuis who couldn't stand seeing the signature of his best author every week in the magazine of his best enemy. So André managed to negotiate a reduction in his "sentence" with Lombard Publishing and put an end to his contract in July 1959, one year sooner than planned, in order to get back full-time into the Dupuis team.

That's the end of the episode… and the withdrawal from a series which can seem to be a minor, odd work in Franquin's career. It was born a little bit by accident, didn't last long (at least when drawn by André ¹³), remained unpretentious, and wasn't as successful as some other stars shot to the heights of fame by the magical pen of his creator, such as Gaston, Spirou or the marsupilami. Nevertheless it played a precursory role in many fields. First, in its form and content, it paved the way for Gaston Lagaffe, who was born less than two years after Modeste: the obvious comparison would be the one of Félix and Modeste vs. Gaston and Fantasio (or later Prunelle), but the training for the weekly one-page gag is important too and Franquin got it thanks to "Modeste et Pompon".

More generally, it was one of the first European one-page gag series: this genre was usual in the US comics but almost ignored in Europe until then, with the exception of "Quick et Flupke", a series drawn by Hergé and which always lived in the crushing shadow of "Tintin". Its situation, family comedy (the pets, the kids, the annoying neighbors…), prefigures "Boule et Bill", "Cubitus", or even "Achille Talon": Greg probably took great advantage of his collaboration with Franquin on "Modeste" to create his star character ¹⁴.

However the series wasn't handed down to posterity. The reason of this is probably the context with "Tintin" and its atmosphere, its team and its management. Of course they had great qualities, but simply didn't fit in with the typical Dupuis child that Franquin was, which forced both sides to make concessions. Moreover the publisher never really believed in the album publication, because he didn't sell a lot of "Quick et Flupke" albums, which was the most recent reference at this time.

This uncomfortable context certainly deprived "Modeste et Pompon" of this bit of madness and genius which eventually led, as the prodigal son returned to Dupuis, to the birth of the most popular of the blunderers.

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Notes 1- In view of the date, it could be "La corne de rhinocéros", published in 1955. 2- Le duel Tintin-Spirou, page 27. 3- Ibid., page 27. 4- Intégrale Franquin, volume 6, page 4. 5- Hergé, who granted to Raymond Leblanc the right to use the name of his famous character as the title of the magazine, had in return the right to check its contents. But Leblanc had the last word, he knew what was selling, and at that time already, Hergé had stood back from editorial choices he disapproved more and more. 6- Intégrale Franquin, volume 6, page 4. 7- Ibid., page 8. 8- Et Franquin créa la gaffe, page 149. 9- For example, if you take the volume #6 of the Intégrale Franquin as a reference (because there the pages are put back into the chronological order), you'll see that Félix is presented as a cousin on page 71 and as a friend on page 183. 10- You'll see five kids at their first appearance in the series (which also is the first appearance of Félix), on page 49 of the volume #6 of the Intégrale Franquin. They're presented as Félix' little cousins (or second cousins? in French it's ambiguous). Only four kids left on page 52… and now they're Félix' nephews. Back to five on page 65, before Franquin finally decides on the trio and on the clothes colors blue, white and red on page 67. Dédé is named only one time on page 217, only a few pages before Franquin withdraws from the series. To be really precise, let's mention that once the kids' profiles are stabilized, they can be told apart, not with their colors, but with their hairdos (two of them have flat hair and the third one has a crew cut) and their noses (among the two with the flat hair, one has a round nose and the other has a longer nose). Dédé is the one with flat hair and a round nose. 11- Contrary to what one can read in Le livre d'or Franquin (Franquin's visitor's book), by Jacky Goupil, Vents d'Ouest Publishing, Paris, 1987, Ducrin is not a "confirmed bachelor", since his wife appears at least once, on page 182 of the volume #6 of the Intégrale Franquin. 12- With the exception of Spirou's adventure in the immediate post-war period, as the guns of the Liberation were still warm and Fantasio could buy a tank on the market from a demobilized US soldier. 13- Do you want to see how Modeste and Pompon looked like in the post-Franquin period? Click here… 14- And Greg paid tribute to his inspiration in the most original way: he made Franquin the "guest star" of an Achille Talon adventure, Le monstre de l'étang Tacule (The monster of the Tacule pond)!