Gaston

Gaston is a gag-a-day comic strip created in 1957 by the Belgian cartoonist André Franquin in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Spirou. The series focuses on the everyday life of Gaston Lagaffe (whose surname means "the blunder"), a lazy and accident-prone office junior. Gaston is very popular in large parts of Europe (especially in Belgium and France) and has been translated into over a dozen languages, but except for a few pages by Fantagraphics in the early 1990s (as Gomer Goof), there was no English translation until Cinebook began publishing English language editions of Gaston books (again named 'Gomer Goof') in July, 2017. Since the 1980s Gaston has appeared on a wide variety of merchandise. In 1996 Franquin was invited to attend the inauguration of Gaston Lagaffe, located on Pachéco Boulevard in Brussels.

Gaston was hired - somewhat mysteriously - as an office junior at the offices of the Journal de Spirou (the real-life publication in which the strip appeared), having wandered in cluelessly. The strip usually focuses on his efforts to avoid doing any work, and indulge instead in hobbies or naps while all around him panic over deadlines, lost mail and contracts. Initially, Gaston was an irritating simpleton, but he developed a genial personality and sense of humour. Common sense however always eludes him, and he has an almost supernatural ability to cause disasters ("gaffes") to which he reacts with his catchphrase: "M'enfin!" ("What the...?"). His job involves chiefly dealing with readers' mail. The ever-growing piles of unanswered letters ("courrier en retard") and the attempts of Fantasio and Léon Prunelle to make him deal with it or to retrieve documentation are recurring themes of the comic.

Gaston's age is a mystery - Franquin himself confessed that he neither knew nor indeed wanted to know it. Although Gaston has a job, a car and his own place, he often acts like a young teenager. In the publication of Dossier Franquin Franquin had said that Gaston is a boy in his late teens but certainly not in his twenties. He is invariably dressed in a tight polo-necked green jumper and blue-jeans, and worn-out espadrilles. It is said that his appearance was originally based on that of Yvan Delporte, editor of the Journal de Spirou at that time. Also, in his first gags, Gaston was an avid cigarette smoker, but his habit was slowly phased out.

Gaston alternates between phases of extreme laziness, when it is near impossible to wake him up, and hyper-activity, when he creates various machines or plays with office furniture. Over the years, he has experimented with cooking, rocket science, music, electronics, decorating, telecommunication, chemistry and many other hobbies, all with uniformly catastrophic results. His Peter Pan-like refusal to grow up and care about his work makes him very endearing, while his antics account for half the stress experienced by his unfortunate co-workers.

Gaston is very fond of animals (as was Franquin of drawing them) and keeps several pets. The main ones are a depressed, aggressive seagull and a hyperactive cat. Like Franquin's most famous animal creation, the Marsupilami, those two never acquired a name and are just referred to as the cat and the seagull. Gaston also sometimes keeps a mouse (Cheese), and a goldfish (Bubulle). The animals are sometimes Gaston's partners in crime, sometimes the victims of his clumsiness and sometimes the perpetrators of nefarious schemes. They are depicted more realistically than the pets in Spirou, in that we are not privy to their inner thoughts. The cat and seagull in particular can be fairly vicious, to the extent of forcing all employees and an unwilling De Mesmaeker to wear helmets, but never to Gaston himself. They often team up to obtain food. For example, in volume 14, the seagull distracts the fishmonger while the cat steals a fish, which they later eat together.

Gaston drives an old Fiat 509, which he acquires in gag #321, decorated with racing patterns that he added himself. However its top speed still allows passengers to safely pick flowers on motorway verges. Much humour derives from the car's extreme state of decrepitude; for example, a friend of Gaston is able to "waterski" behind it on a slick of oil, while Gaston strenuously denies any such leaks. The car also produces huge quantities of (often toxic) smoke, even more so when Gaston converts it to run on coal. Some of Gaston's colleagues are terrified at the very thought of sitting in the Fiat - Prunelle swears on several occasions that he will never set foot in it again. The car is also the source of many clashes with Longtarin, as Gaston endlessly devises schemes to avoid paying parking meters, even going as far as parking it up in a tree or faking roadworks.

Spirou and Fantasio, the main supporting character and irritable straight man to Gaston in the early part of the series. Franquin acknowledged with regret that he had totally destroyed the original clown-like personality of the character by using him in this role. In Gaston, instead of having adventures and doing some reporting, Fantasio has an editorial role in the magazine and, as such, has the impossible task of trying to put Gaston to work. By the time the story Bravo les Brothers came out (which, while nominally a Spirou et Fantasio story, was effectively hijacked by Gaston), it was time for Fantasio to leave. When Fournier took over the Spirou et Fantasio series in 1970, Fantasio disappeared from Gaston. At first he made the occasional guest appearance, even once returning in the office itself, his absence explained as being away in Champignac, but otherwise faded out completely.

Léon Prunelle, an editor at the Journal de Spirou. Prunelle is even more short-tempered than Fantasio, from whom he has inherited not only the mammoth task of making Gaston work, but also the job of signing contracts with important businessman Aimé De Mesmaeker (see below). Initially optimistic about this, Prunelle slowly realizes that he cannot win. However he refuses to give up and sometimes resorts to drastic measures, such as locking up Gaston in the cellar or even a cupboard. Perpetually at the end of his tether, running around barking orders, Prunelle turns a nasty reddish purple when disaster strikes and utters his trademark outburst "Rogntudju!" (a mangled version of "Nom de Dieu", roughly the equivalent of "bloody hell", then unacceptable in a children's comic). Occasionally, he manages to turn the tables on Gaston and shows that he is not without a sense of humour. He has black hair, a short beard and wears glasses.

Yves Lebrac, an in-house cartoonist, is comparatively laid-back. He is fond of puns and we see him woo (and eventually win) one of the attractive secretary girls over the course of the series. Although mostly on good terms with Gaston (unlike Prunelle), he occasionally loses his temper when deadlines loom and Gaston's interference becomes too much. When not a victim of "gaffes", he is a lenient comrade of Gaston, and the character with which Franquin himself most identified.

Joseph Boulier, a surly accountant for Éditions Dupuis, the publishers of the magazine. He states that he will not rest until he has tracked down every useless expense in the company, and in particular those of Gaston. However, his attempts to cause Gaston grief backfire in spectacular ways. He represents the more serious side of the comics publishing business.

Mademoiselle Jeanne ("M'oiselle Jeanne" to Gaston), a redheaded with freckles, is one of Gaston's colleagues and his love interest. She was first depicted as comically unattractive in a gag where Gaston needs a partner for the back end of his pantomime horse costume, and chooses Jeanne because of her ponytail. Gradually however, she became cuter with her body turning from pear-shaped to curvaceous - if never really a beauty queen. Jeanne is a perfect match for Gaston, as she admires his talent, his courage, his inventiveness and is utterly oblivious to his lack of common sense - of which she herself has fairly little. However their courtship is perpetually stuck at the very first step. They address each other with the formal vous and as "Mister" and "Miss" and see each other mainly at the office - though they have had the occasional outing together. This platonic relationship, in a way, is in keeping with Gaston's refusal or inability to grow up. It is revealed in the album En direct de la gaffe that Jeanne is color blind: she can't tell green from red. She also still lives with her mother and, although it is assumed that she is well beyond her teens, is shown grounded after a row.

Despite being lazy, Gaston invented many items to make the job easier. Normally, this item is fiction and harms himself. Then he often expressed surprise, sadness or shame only by the phrase "M'enfin?" (can be translated as "Oh, come on"). Some of Gaston's inventions, such as tie machines, ultrasonic teapots, living room lights, ashtrays, a "all-in-one" device for mosquitoes and mole, can be named. and chickens, a rearview mirror for pedestrians ... With a musical soul, he created some lively instruments, especially the "gaffophone", with a sound that could not be defined as the sound of a window crash, a chirping sound or a jet flying above my head. The sharp members of the Green Peace team hired this instrument to protect the whales from the fishermen by threatening them to leave the area. He also plays many other instruments (frightening), such as guitar, tuba, trombone ... As a talented chef, Gaston knows how to make many delicious dishes, such as strawberry and cod fish. snow pineapple, hot air balloon crumbs (including accidental use of colors).

  

In the end, Gaston has a special sense of ecology and loves his little animals: a hyperactive cat, a seagull bird, a goldfish and a few mice. But because his apartment was so small, he had to raise all those animals in the office. This became more and more troublesome when he brought a cow (or some pig) to the office that he won in a competition, especially when the animal tried to eat some of the important papers of the fellow Gaston career ... In short, Gaston is a big child, a clumsy man with a kind heart.

Authors at Spirou could only go so far in expressing anything resembling politics within the magazine, and so the author of Gaston generally stuck to a gentle satire of productivity and authority. However, the pacifism and concern for the environment that formed the basis of Franquin's politics and would be expressed much more bluntly in Idées noires were already surfacing in Gaston (and Spirou et Fantasio). Very occasionally, Franquin stepped over the mark, as in an uncharacteristically angry strip where Gaston uses a toy Messerschmitt plane to strafe the whole office in protest at their (real life) appearance in the magazine's modelling column (while building the model, he says: “… and now, the swastikas. They are very popular amongst retards”). Outside of Spirou however, Franquin had a free rein, and used Gaston in promotional material for diverse organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International. In the former, activists scare whales away from whalers by plucking the dreaded gaffophone. For the latter, Franquin produced a gut-wrenching sequence where Gaston is beaten and tortured and forced to watch M'oiselle Jeanne raped in front of him, before being sent to a prison camp. In the penultimate frame he faces capital punishment which the punters hope "serves as an example". Awaking in a sweat, Gaston shouts at the reader that "although this was a nightmare, it's happening right now around the world", urging membership.

Gaston has also appeared in advertising campaigns for batteries, a soft drink (Orange Piedboeuf), and in a campaign to promote bus use. The material was always drawn by Franquin himself rather than under licence, and has been reprinted in books. The latter campaign is interesting in that it shows Franquin's evolution from car enthusiast inventing the Turbo-traction and other fancy sports vehicles for Spirou in the 1950s, to disillusioned citizen concerned over traffic and pollution in later years. One topical strip had the seagull boycotting Gaston's car after seeing a bird stuck in an oil spill on television. "Life is becoming more and more complicated", its owner concludes gloomily in a very rare joke-free ending.