The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Even with all the festivities celebrating his 100th anniversary, you’d almost think that Hergé only ever created one comic character, the omnipresent Tintin. Well, think again: Quick & Flupke, two kids from the streets of Brussels, are ready to take on the world. Again, only this time it’s serious. Hergé created the two young rascals in 1930 and their adventures ran in Le Petit Vingtième until 1940. The stories focused on Quick and Flupke’s uncanny talent for getting into trouble and creating all kinds of havoc. With all that slapstick humour and situation comedy, however, Hergé also used his gag stories as a vehicle for social and political satire, most notably in his series about Mussolini and Hitler. Next time somebody blatantly accuses Hergé of strictly right-wing sympathies, point them to this cartoon.

(cover to Hergé’s Chacun son Tour starring Quick and Fluke, published by Casterman)

After World War II, Quick and Flupke’s legacy was kept alive in Tintin Magazine. The newly coloured versions also made it into a series of small books, which were reprinted well into the 1970’s. After Hergé’s death in 1983, the Studios Hergé commissioned Johan De Moor, son of Hergé’s right hand man Bob De Moor, to re-edit and sometimes even redraw the cartoons for a new series. From 1985 until 1991, twelve large-format albums were published in Dutch and French, accompanying a series of short animated films that ran on television. In the early nineties, two volumes of strips were published in English by Mammoth Publishing.

Recently, Quick and Flupke seemed to have retired, kept alive artificially by Moulinsart only as a design element on various products, from children’s clothes to postcards to cookie jars. This year, however, they’re back where they started: in the comics. Publishing house Euro Books is planning to re-launch the series from November onwards in, of all places, India. Uday Madhur, manager of Euro Books, calls the launch a test case. He’s planning to spread to other countries if everything goes according to plan.

(interior panel from Chacun son Tour by Hergé, published by Casterman)

It may be an unlikely situation, but at least in this way a new part of the world can get to know Tintin’s colourful little brothers and their adventures in pre-war Brussels, which must be as exotic to them as it is to us today in modern Belgium.