Few comic strip authors have left as important a legacy as André Franquin. His influence is such that it is difficult to find a humorous comic artist in Europe who has not been influenced, directly or indirectly, by him. Franquin is an author read and admired not only by his thousands of readers but also by his professional colleagues. Hergé, Tintin’s creator, called him “a great artist” and added, modestly: “Compared to him, I am just a poor draftsman.” Uderzo, graphic father of Asterix, successfully recreated Franquin’s style years before creating the small and irreducible Gaul.

André Franquin was born in Belgium on January 3, 1924 and died in France on January 5, 1997. His career is a reflection of the changes that comics have experienced in the last century. He began working as a cartoonist by chance, at the end of World War II, when few could imagine that making comics was a profession. Sponsored by Jijé, a versatile cartoonist who wanted to be a painter or sculptor, he published his first pages in the magazine Spirou, a youth weekly with strong Catholic convictions, where he met another young debutante with whom he would form a lifelong friendship, Morris. , the creator of Lucky Luke. Very soon he was the one who tutored the first steps of another artist – even younger – called Peyo and who years later would become world famous with his Smurfs.

Franquin took up the Spirou and Fantasio series, which was then a mere succession of anecdotes, gave it solidity, depth, and turned it into a classic from the golden age of Franco-Belgian comics. He created a long-tailed animal called Marsupilami and gave birth to a fun and endearing dreamer who was not a fan of office work, Gastón Elgafe, an antihero far from the conventions that were still common in comic strip characters at the time. Between 1950 and 1968, in his most classic period, Franquin signed unforgettable albums such as There is a Witcher in Champignac, The Mask, The Nest of the Marsupilamis, The Mesozoic Traveler or Z as Zorglub.

His graphic style reaches an unparalleled baroque style in QRN in Bretzelburg, which the historic Bruguera publishing house will show Francisco Ibáñez as an aesthetic model to follow when drawing the pages of El sulfato atomic. Since 1969, Franquin sees that times are changing and he himself is already a different author. Tired, depressed and terribly critical of his work, he embraces another type of comic, closer to the underground, with which he dynamites the classic style that he had established, and then illuminates one of his great milestones: Black Ideas. There he freely expresses all his anxieties, his concern for the environment and the future of the planet, his complete opposition to the army and war. All the pages – somber but beautiful – are impregnated with disillusionment towards everything around him. A work very far removed from the children’s comic of his beginnings and that endorses Franquin not only as a talented artist but as someone sensitive to new social concerns.

Both in its facet for all audiences and in its more adult version, what does not change in Franquin are the keys to his style. His vignettes are always dynamic and rich in multiple details, his characters move as if they were made of rubber, his expressiveness is absolute. In Franquin’s comics we perceive the weight of the coat that the wealthy businessman puts on, we notice the soft carpet of the office through which he advances with a firm step. He is also capable of drawing the roofs of the city or the walls of an old house in the middle of the countryside with an unprecedented sensitivity and turning these spaces into endearing places in which the reader wants to get lost. Because Franquin is a poet of the image, he does not limit himself to portraying the landscape but gives it life by touching it with his drawing.

Starting from Hergé’s clear line, Franquin introduces distortion, saturation of elements, noise and a vigorous sense of movement, nervous and histrionic. All of his comics without exception – because Franquin does not have bad albums – continue to be a wonderful read today and an invaluable lesson in drawing and graphic narrative as long as we do not fall into the mistake of trying to do the same thing that he did better than nobody. Those who have tried to copy him using their own weapons have always remained one step below. They all lack something that cannot be achieved with all the effort in the world: genius.