29 March, 2024
Franquin-style adaption of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (ill. Maria Simone "Simo" Blüchert; (c) 2013 the artists; Spirou (c) Dupuis; image from meganepokomi.tumblr.com)

Fanart Friday: On the Road Again

Two years ago, Fanart Friday featured a panel from an exercise in the Graphical Storytelling course at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, where students had to adapt an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road using Franquin’s characters and style. Back then it was the only example I could track down, but recently a bit more digging uncovered entries from many more students.

Franquin-style adaption of Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (ill. Maria Simone "Simo" Blüchert; (c) 2013 the artists; Spirou (c) Dupuis; image from meganepokomi.tumblr.com)
‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy and Muir Jover, after Franquin (2015)

The assignment was set by Mårdøn Smet, and the rules specified a one- or two-page comic, imitating Franquin’s style in the period 1956–1958. As you can see, there was considerable variation in how the students adapted the same text.

By Muir Jover (2):

By Sofie Louise Dam:

By Nilas Røpke Driessen:

By Mathilde Garreau:

By Line Høj Høstrup:

By Kristian Bay Kirk and Bob Lundgreen Kristiansen:

By Maria Simone “Simo” Büchert, Clara J. Bjerre, Cathrin Peterslund, Aske Schmidt Rose and Albert Bruun (from before):

And that’s all the ones known to Spirou Reporter!

Spirou Reporter

I grew up reading Spirou in Scandinavian translations. Now I'm learning French and trying to decode the originals.

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9 thoughts on “Fanart Friday: On the Road Again

  1. Very interesting. The ‘Can we keep him?’ question is asked about multiple characters… And apparently in the first comic Fantasio is called Frantasio as a parody name, while Gaston is still called Gaston. I’m wondering why these comics are in English though?

    1. The characters are always the father, the son and the old man, but “played” by different Franquin characters in each adaptation (sometimes using the Franquin character names, sometimes sticking with the “names” from the book). So it’s always the son asking the father whether they can keep the old man. See this chapter summary.

      I think “Frantasio” may just be a mistake. He’s called “Kvik” in Danish, so the artist may not have been very familiar with the French version. There are a few other mistakes in the text of the comics.

      The class probably got the excerpt of the book in English. Maybe they were told not to translate it, or maybe they just thought it was easier not to.

      1. Thanks for you reply. I got the general idea about the father, son and old man but didn’t precisely understand that.
        Yes, it’s very likely they weren’t familiar with the original version of Spirou et Fantasio. And ‘Frantasio’ isn’t a weird mistake at all, hence the ‘Fr’ in the names ‘Franquin’ and ‘François’ for example.
        (I wrote this comment earlier but it didn’t get posted? Sorry if it’s double.)

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