by 
When Spirou turned 75th, he got a whole anniversary Year of Spirou in his honor. Today (ahem!) is the 75th anniversary of the first appearance of both Spip and Fantasio, in the 8. June, 1939 issue of the Journal de Spirou. There hasn’t been much celebration of that, but perhaps a suitable scanlation is in order…
Both of them had rather modest debuts. Spip appears in the background of the last panel of that week’s installment of an ongoing story, while Fantasio is simply a signature on one of the magazine’s columns. It would be another four and a half years before he’d turn up in the comic itself, but in the mean time he was a character in the Spirou puppet theater Le Farfadet. (One of the publisher’s wartime initiatives to entertain children.) This puppet version, designed by André Moons, looked rather different from the character we’ve come to know:
When Jijé introduced him as a character in the comic, he didn’t base it off the Fantasio puppet. So it makes you wonder: Are there two Fantasios? …
This one-pager takes place between the last Spirou strip by Rob-Vel (in the 2. September 1943 issue of the Journal, just before it was shut down by the Nazis) and “our” Fantasio’s introduction in Jijé’s first story after he took over, in the album L’Espiègle au grand cœur (“The Rascal with a Heart of Gold”) that same month. It’s from an imaginary issue of the Journal created by Al Séverin as a sort of promo for his book Spirou sous le manteau (“Spirou Under the Counter”), which ran as a supplement in the Journal de Spirou #3934.
i had heard about fantasio was first appeared at november 16? so this is like, two different fantasio or…?
Uh, that’s probably referring to his first in-comic appearance, in L’Espiègle au grand coeur. I wrote that it came out in September 1943 (following info in Tout Jijé), but most other sources say November. Don’t know where the 16th comes from; I get the impression that publication/distribution was getting so difficult around that time that they couldn’t specify an exact publication date.
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No, it’s NOT still Sunday! Unacceptable!
I figure with time zones and daylight savings time and stuff, it’s got to be Sunday SOMEWH… Oh, just shut it! 😉 (Truth is, it was a beautiful day, and I didn’t want to spend all of it inside updating a website.)
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