Trivia / Spirou & Fantasio

• Creator's Favorite:
  • Gaston Lagaffe, for Franquin, to the point he resigned from Spirou & Fantasio in order to deal exclusively with his Spin-Off.
  • Fournier used to particularly like Spip, to the point he sometimes showed his antics on a whole page, or made short stories revolving around him. Fournier even tried at some point to make a spin off journal for younger readers named "Spip", but it didn't work.
  • Tome and Janry apparently liked their creation Vito Cortizone a lot as he's featured in four of their 14 albums, including three that follow.
• Creator's Pest:
  • The whole cast (but Gaston) for Franquin, at the end of his run. He was fed up with this series that he did not create, and suffered a Creator Breakdown. As a result, his last album, Panade à Champignac, is anything but heroic. Not only Spirou and Fantasio run out of gas in the middle of a high speed pursuit, and bicker Like an Old Married Couple for this reason, but they have to change the diapers of Zorglub. The latter is ridiculed through Emotional Regression that reduces him to having the mind of an 8 month old.
  • Fournier notoriously loathed Seccotine, deemed by him as a nuisance due to being irritating. He made it obvious by inventing Ororéa, her Suspiciously Similar Substitute, both a nice girl, and liked by other characters. The only time he included Seccotine was in an anniversary story homaging Franquin's characters, and she looked ugly in it. Fournier apparently didn't like Fantasio either, but in this case, it did not show up at all.
  • Tome and Janry disliked Spip and his acerbic remarks. To Tome, this capacity to articulate his thoughts was not realistic. As a result, in Spirou et Fantasio à Moscou, the trio is captured and Bound and Gagged in the very beginning. But when they are released, everyone forgets to remove the piece of tape on Spip's mouth. The latter is subsequently mute for nearly the whole story. ^note Despite this is useless: it should not refrain Spip from expressing himself, as he thinks his lines and does not tell them out loud. Janry added that they had enough of his commentaries. Because Spip bothered them, it was their way to "punish" him. Spirou and Fantasio tend to forget him all along this story, and on purpose, to "not hear him protest." In the subsequent albums of this run, Spip's thoughts are not expressed for no reason. In the last story of those authors, Machine qui rêve, Spip is only seen in a few panels in addition.
• Executive Meddling: Between 1980 and 1983, the series went through three different teams due to internal fights between the magazine's leadership. After owner Charles Dupuis suddenly decided to fire Fournier while he was busy writing a new story -and despite the support from the editor, Alain de Kuyssche-, concept director José Dutilleu hired Nic Broca and Raoul Cauvin to work on the series. But De Kuyssche wasn't happy with that unilateral decision, so he offered all the artists at the magazine the chance to draw their own Spirou, resulting in Tome and Janry handing in their vastly superior take on the series. During those years, even though Nic and Cauvin were the official Spirou team, Tome and Janry published several stories, including a full-length one (Virus) that was far better received by the readership than Nic and Cauvin's. It helped that, for some reason, the official team had not been allowed to use the series' large number of supporting characters, making their stories seem more of an "alternate universe" interpretation than a logical continuation, and causing them to be much weaker than Tome and Janry's, who didn't have that same limitation. After three years of internal struggle, and with the readers firmly on Tome and Janry's side, Dutilleu finally gave up and removed Nic and Cauvin from the series.
• Exiled from Continuity: As André Franquin owned the rights to the Marsupilami, his departure from the series meant the species similarly vanished from it by 1969. It wouldn't be until 2015 (by which point Dupuis had bought Marsu Productions) that the species would return to the Spirou and Fantasio series.
• Late Export for You: It took until 2009 for the series to receive a consistent English release; earlier attempts were made, but never went past one volume. Even so, many of the stories so far remain untranslated.
  • The series has been popular in Spain for decades and has mostly received timely translations. But 1998's Machine qui rêve was so divisive that the publisher that held the rights then, Grijalbo, gave up on them rather than translate it. The next imprint to acquire the rights, Planeta deAgostini, pretended that Machine simply didn't exist and moved on to the next one, Paris-sous-Seine. It took 19 years until a third publisher, Dibbuks, finally translated it in 2017.
• Out of Order: Cinebook's English translations stray far from chronological order, with their first release (Adventure Down Under) being the thirty-fourth album produced, and Franquin stories slotted in between those of Tome and Janry.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Jean-Claude Fournier was a huge Spirou & Fantasio fan when he was a kid and even drew what amounts to Fan Art. When he got the chance to take over from André Franquin, he gladly accepted.
  • The German comic artist Flix is a big Spirou & Fantasio fan, too. He got the chance to make an official issue which became Spirou in Berlin — and which shows all elements of very good Fan Fiction which, technically speaking, it is.
• Recycled Script: A recurring villain has kidnapped an important member of the supporting cast and it's up to Spirou and Fantasio to rescue him by travelling to an abandoned castle in a small town, which the locals insist is haunted. Upon closer inspection, though, it turns out it's just full of booby traps to scare any intruders away. Le faiseur d'or, or L'Abayee truquée? Spirou himself lampshades it in the latter. It doesn't help that there was only one other album between the two.
• Referenced by...: In one episode of Radio Enfer, Carl gets a job as a waiter in a restaurant, where his uniform includes red pants, a red long-sleeved shirt with several yellow buttons on the front, and a rounded red hat. Upon seeing him in that outfit, Camille jokingly asks why he's dressed like Spirou, much to Carl's annoyance.
• Schedule Slip: Nearly all the major runs at their end (hence the changes of creative team), but Tome and Janry's was particularly egregious (up to three years between their last two albums).
• Sequel Gap: The classic series ended with Machine qui rêve in 1998. Because of the fans' dislike of that story, it took six years before the series continued in 2004 with Paris-sous-Seine.
• Unfinished Episode: Following Machine qui rêve, Tome and Janry worked on a story titled Spirou in Cuba, which would have had Zorglub (now portrayed more seriously than before) plot to take over Cuba and turn it into a large prison, with the inmates becoming gladiators fighting for their lives in virtual reality games. For several reasons, the story remained in Development Hell before ultimately being scrapped, with only the first eight pages completed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • QRN sur Bretzelburg was intended by Franquin to be another Zorglub-centric story, but this was vetoed by the publisher because of the character's prominence at that time, forcing a rewrite.
  • Franquin and Hergé wanted to make a one-page crossover between Spirou and Tintin as part of an April's Fool, but the idea was shot down by their respective publishers. A sketch is all that remained.

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