La Paresse

La Paresse

France, 1949 · Belgium, 1957Laziness was on the list.

A drawn 1950s office in uproar: a tower of unsigned contracts tied with red string, a typewriter, a telephone off the hook, coffee steaming, a paper aeroplane in flight, a red hammock still swinging between a filing cabinet and a coat stand. On the wall, a notice of the law of 16 July 1949 with the words la paresse circled in red pencil. Through the window, a parking meter with a flower growing from its coin slot. ♪ Narrated · free · 12 min
Press play before you turn the page The whole story, all six pages, in 12 minutes. A censor who wrote the list, an editor who slipped past it, a reader who was nine in 1957, and the record keeping all three honest. The page follows along.
  • The Commissioner
  • The Record
  • The Editor
  • The Reader
Paris · 16 July 19491

The list

France wrote a law about what children could read. It named the vices a page must never make look good. Laziness was fourth.

A drawn page of the Journal officiel printing the law of 16 July 1949, Article 2, with la paresse circled by a red pencil and a red rubber stamp of the surveillance commission.

On 16 July 1949 France passed Law no. 49-956 on publications intended for young people. It covered every illustrated weekly a child could buy at a kiosk, French or imported.

Loi n° 49-956, article 2 (1949)

« Les publications visées à l’article 1er ne doivent comporter aucune illustration, aucun récit, aucune chronique, aucune rubrique, aucune insertion présentant sous un jour favorable le banditisme, le mensonge, le vol, la paresse, la lâcheté, la haine, la débauche ou tous actes qualifiés crimes ou délits ou de nature à démoraliser l’enfance ou la jeunesse. » The publications covered by Article 1 must contain no illustration, no story, no column, no feature and no insert that presents in a favourable light banditry, lying, theft, laziness, cowardice, hatred, debauchery, or any act defined as a crime or offence or likely to demoralise children or young people. Text of 1949, reprinted in Enfance, 1953 · current text on Légifrance

Article 3 set up a commission at the Ministry of Justice to watch and control publications for children and adolescents. The law also let the Minister of the Interior ban any publication dangerous to youth from sale to minors, from public display and from advertising. That power reached adult magazines too, and it was used.

Belgium had no such censorship. It did not need one. Belgian weeklies earned their living in France, so the French commission read them. In 1952 it issued a warning over André Franquin’s Les Voleurs du Marsupilami. The same year Dupuis cut a Lucky Luke story by Morris to please the commission. Charles Dupuis put every submission through a pre-censorship of his own, with the family priest checking the religious rules.

“Cette créature absurde et imaginaire pousse des cris inarticulés.”The commission, 1952, on the Marsupilami: “this absurd and imaginary creature utters inarticulate cries”

The list held for sixty-two years. A 1954 amendment added ethnic prejudice, a 2010 amendment added sexism, and in May 2011 the article was rewritten from top to bottom. Laziness came off the list then, and not before.

Marcinelle · 28 February 19572

The office boy

Eight years after the list, a Catholic children’s weekly gave its pages to a young man whose whole talent was not working.

A drawn open magazine seen from above, its panels laid out in a grid, with a trail of black footprints wandering through the gutters between the panels and off the edge of the page. A yellow caption box reads: Qui est-ce, celui-là ?

Dupuis was a Catholic printing house in Marcinelle, near Charleroi, started by Jean Dupuis in 1898. Its weekly, Spirou, first appeared on 21 April 1938. In the 1950s it was a family magazine sold to children in Belgium and France.

On 28 February 1957, in issue 985, footprints appeared in the margins. Then a young man walked through the magazine, with no name, no lines and no explanation. Franquin called him “un héros sans emploi”: a hero without a job. The editor-in-chief who let him in was Yvan Delporte, in charge of Spirou from 1955 to 1968, a man the Lambiek comics encyclopedia describes as having “an anarchist and provocative nature”.

His name was Gaston Lagaffe. By issue 1000, on 13 June 1957, he had walked into the comics themselves. From issue 1025, on 5 December 1957, he had his own weekly half-page, drawn by Franquin with Jidéhem. The job he finally got was office boy at the magazine. He slept at work, invented machines that exploded, kept animals in the office, and did not deliver the mail.

“M’enfin !”Gaston’s catchphrase, borrowed from a verbal tic of Jidéhem

A gag is hard to censor. The law asked whether a page showed laziness in a favourable light. In a gag the lazy one always pays: the boss shouts, the machine explodes, the work piles up. On paper, every page punished him. The reader still finished every page on his side. A commission trained to read a story for its moral found nothing to read, because a gag has no moral. It has a laugh, and the laugh takes a side.

The law left its mark on the strip anyway. The editor Prunelle swears “Rogntudju!”, a word Franquin built from the Walloon oath for “in the name of God”, because a real oath could not be printed in a youth weekly.

Spirou · 1957 to the 1980s3

No message, every target

The office boy got in the way of everything a well-run world depends on. Week after week, the gags picked the same targets.

A drawn four-panel strip of objects: a contract with an empty signature line and a fountain pen that has burst into a blot of ink; a parking meter covered in red knitting with a flower growing from it; a soldier’s helmet turned upside down and planted with flowers; a factory chimney stopped with a cork.
  • The contractMonsieur De Mesmaeker, a businessman, comes to the office to sign contracts. Something always stops him: a gadget, a pet, a flood, Gaston. The running gag was suggested by the writer Greg, and the contracts stay unsigned.
  • The bossFirst Fantasio, then from 1968 the editor Prunelle: the office hierarchy, permanently losing an argument with an office boy who does not argue.
  • The uniformAgent Longtarin, the local policeman, and his parking meters. In the late 1970s the strip ran a war on parking meters, and Spirou printed stickers for readers: “You have paid to drive, now pay to stop.”
  • The bomb and the chimneyFranquin took a clear stance against pollution, nuclear power, the arms race and the death penalty, with strong anti-militarist feelings, and the gags followed him there.

In 1968, according to the Centre Pompidou, Dupuis received a letter from the authorities asking it to rein in Franquin’s jabs at the police. In 1978 Franquin drew a page for Amnesty International showing Gaston tortured and hanged. In the 1980s Gaston worked on posters for UNICEF and Amnesty.

“Ce n’est ni un bourgeois, ni un anarchiste. Gaston est… disons, un étourdi, un clown. […] Je n’ai aucun message culturel ou politique à délivrer.”André Franquin, 1979: “He is neither a bourgeois nor an anarchist. Gaston is, let us say, a scatterbrain, a clown. I have no cultural or political message to deliver.”

Franquin said it plainly, and more than once: he was not a political cartoonist, his opinions leaned left and he kept them out of his comics. Take him at his word. The law of 1949 never asked what an author meant. It asked what a page showed, and in what light. For thirty years a children’s weekly showed a young man who would not work, would not obey, would not sign and would not salute, and showed him as the one you liked.

Spirou · 17 March 19774

Gloves off

Twenty years in, Franquin and Delporte stopped smuggling and printed a pirate inside the magazine.

A drawn magazine page torn open by a brass trombone bursting out of it, on a black ground with a pool of spilled ink, and a red banner reading Supplément !

Le Trombone illustré ran from 17 March to 20 October 1977: thirty issues, stapled inside Spirou as a supplement. Franquin and Delporte made it. Dupuis ended it.

It is where Idées noires began: Franquin’s black pages, drawn in ink with almost no colour at all. When the Trombone was shut, the strip moved to Fluide Glacial, the adult humour monthly Gotlib, Alexis and Jacques Diament had founded on 1 April 1975, at Gotlib’s suggestion. It ran there until May 1983 and came out as albums in 1981 and 1984.

The children’s magazine had carried the office boy for twenty years. The dark pages needed an adult magazine to print them, and they got one.

The kiosk · 1946 to 19755

The rest of the kiosk

Gaston was the quiet one. On the same racks, the loud ones were banned, seized and fined.

A drawn newspaper kiosk with three shelves of brightly coloured magazine covers, two strips of tape across them reading INTERDIT, SAISI and INTERDIT AUX MINEURS.

Laziness was a political idea long before it was a vice on a list. Paul Lafargue’s Le Droit à la paresse, The Right to Be Lazy, ran in the socialist paper L’Égalité in 1880. Seventy years later the people around Gaston were paying for less.

  • 1946–1954

    Boris Vian

    J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, published in 1946 under the name Vernon Sullivan, was banned in 1949. Vian was convicted of offending public morals in 1950 and fined 100,000 francs. His song Le Déserteur, recorded by Mouloudji on 14 May 1954, was barred from French radio.
  • 1952

    Georges Brassens

    Le Gorille was kept off French radio and Radio Luxembourg. Europe 1 first played it in 1955.
  • 1954–1955

    The Comics Code

    After US Senate hearings in April and June 1954, American publishers adopted the Comics Code in October. MAD turned into a magazine with issue 24, in July 1955, which took it out from under the Code.
  • 1957

    The Situationist International

    Founded in July 1957 at Cosio di Arroscia in Italy, the year of Gaston’s first footprints. The Belgian Raoul Vaneigem wrote its Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations in 1967, and later an essay called Éloge de la paresse affinée, in praise of refined laziness. He died in Barcelona in July 2026, aged 92.
  • 1958

    The Smurfs

    Peyo’s Smurfs first appeared in Spirou on 23 October 1958, inside a Johan et Pirlouit story. Yvan Delporte went on to write many of their stories.
  • 1959

    Pilote

    The French weekly of Goscinny, Uderzo and Charlier, first issue 29 October 1959.
  • 1960–1966

    Hara-Kiri

    Founded in September 1960 by Cavanna and Georges Bernier, the Professeur Choron. Fred drew the first cover; Cabu, Gébé, Topor and Wolinski had joined by 1961. The monthly was banned in 1961 and again in 1966.
  • 1964

    Barbarella

    Jean-Claude Forest’s album, published by Éric Losfeld in 1964, was banned for minors at once under the 1949 law. The 1968 printing was retouched at the censor’s request.
  • 1969

    Léo Ferré

    Les Anarchistes, recorded in 1969.
  • 1970

    “Bal tragique à Colombey – 1 mort”

    Charles de Gaulle died on 9 November 1970. L’Hebdo Hara-Kiri no. 94 went on sale on the 13th with that front page. On 17 November the Minister of the Interior, Raymond Marcellin, banned it from sale to minors, from display and from advertising, using the youth law of 1949. The team renamed the paper. Charlie Hebdo no. 1 is dated 23 November 1970.
  • 1972–1975

    Adults only

    L’Écho des savanes, by Bretécher, Gotlib and Mandryka, in May 1972. Fluide Glacial in April 1975. Métal hurlant in January 1975, from Les Humanoïdes Associés: Dionnet, Druillet, Moebius and Farkas.

The law built for children ended up as a weapon against adult satire, and the satirists answered by founding magazines a child could not buy. The office boy never needed one. He stayed in the children’s weekly, on the kiosk rack at child height, every week.

Marcinelle · 22 November 20236

Under contract

The man who never got a contract signed came back because of one.

A drawn drawing table at night, the lamp switched off, an empty stool beside it, a blank sheet pinned to the board and a contract lying on it with someone else’s blue signature.

André Franquin was born in Etterbeek on 3 January 1924 and died on 5 January 1997. His daughter, Isabelle Franquin, says her father told her personally that he did not want Gaston drawn by anyone else.

Dupuis announced a new Gaston album for October 2022. She went to court. In May 2022, before a Brussels judge, Dupuis undertook to publish nothing until an arbitrator ruled. The award came on 30 May 2023 and rested on a contract from 1992: Dupuis may continue Gaston, must consult her and report to her every six months, and she may object to anything that distorts the work. The award is final.

Le Retour de Lagaffe, drawn by Delaf, came out on 22 November 2023. Dupuis had announced 1.2 million copies; Livres Hebdo reported 800,000 printed, and it topped the GfK sales chart in its first week. Isabelle Franquin did not endorse it: “Je ne puis aller contre la volonté de l’auteur.” I cannot go against the will of the author.

Monsieur De Mesmaeker spent decades trying to get one contract signed and never did. Laziness left French law in May 2011. Twelve years later the laziest man in comics went back to work, on a contract signed in 1992.

Read the narration as text

The list

The ReaderI was nine in nineteen fifty-seven. Every Thursday I bought the same weekly at the kiosk, and every week I turned straight to the office boy.

The CommissionerThen you were exactly the child we were protecting. You are welcome, madam.

The ReaderProtecting me from what?

The RecordFor the record. On the sixteenth of July, nineteen forty-nine, France passed a law on publications intended for young people. It covered every illustrated weekly a child could buy, French or imported.

The CommissionerArticle two. Read it out. I am proud of article two.

The RecordNo illustration, no story, no column, no feature and no insert may present in a favourable light banditry, lying, theft, laziness, cowardice, hatred, debauchery, or any crime, or anything likely to demoralise children.

The ReaderLaziness. Fourth on the list. After theft, and before cowardice.

The CommissionerA child who learns to admire idleness will not learn to admire much else. We wrote it down so that nobody could pretend not to know.

The RecordArticle three created a commission at the Ministry of Justice to watch and control publications for children. The law also let the Minister of the Interior ban a publication from sale to minors, from display and from advertising.

The EditorAnd I worked in Belgium. We had no such law.

The CommissionerYou did not need one. You sold in France. We read everything you sold.

The RecordIn nineteen fifty-two the commission issued a warning about a Franquin story. Its complaint, word for word: this absurd and imaginary creature utters inarticulate cries.

The EditorThe Marsupilami. A cartoon animal, accused of making noise.

The RecordThe same year, the publisher cut a Lucky Luke story to please the commission. Charles Dupuis had every submission read before it went to print, and the family priest checked the religious rules.

The ReaderSo the French list ran a Belgian magazine.

The CommissionerLists are efficient. That is what they are for.

The RecordThe list held for sixty-two years. Ethnic prejudice was added in nineteen fifty-four, sexism in twenty ten. In May twenty eleven the article was rewritten, and laziness came off.

The ReaderSixty-two years. Long enough for an office boy to get through.

The office boy

The RecordThe publisher was a Catholic printing house in Marcinelle, near Charleroi, started by Jean Dupuis in eighteen ninety-eight. Its weekly first appeared on the twenty-first of April, nineteen thirty-eight.

The EditorA family magazine. Clean, careful, and sold in France. Which is why what happened next had to be done quietly.

The RecordIssue nine hundred and eighty-five. The twenty-eighth of February, nineteen fifty-seven. Footprints in the margins.

The ReaderI remember the footprints. They walked between the pictures, where nothing is supposed to happen.

The EditorThen a young man walked through the magazine. No name. No lines. No explanation. Franquin called him a hero without a job.

The CommissionerWho approved this?

The RecordThe editor in chief from nineteen fifty-five to nineteen sixty-eight was Yvan Delporte. The Lambiek encyclopedia describes him as having an anarchist and provocative nature.

The CommissionerThat is not a recommendation.

The RecordBy issue one thousand, the thirteenth of June, nineteen fifty-seven, he had walked into the comics. From the fifth of December that year he had his own weekly half page, drawn by Franquin with the artist Jidéhem.

The ReaderHis name was Gaston Lagaffe. They made him the office boy of the magazine itself. He slept at work. He built machines that exploded. He kept animals in the office. He did not deliver the mail.

The EditorAnd whenever anyone caught him, he said one word.

The ReaderM’enfin!

The CommissionerVery well. Let us apply the law. Does this page show laziness in a favourable light?

The EditorLook at the page. The boss shouts. The machine explodes. The work piles up to the ceiling. Every single week, the lazy one pays.

The CommissionerThen the page punishes him. Then it passes.

The ReaderAnd every single week, I finished the page on his side.

The EditorThat is the trick. You were trained to read a story for its moral. A gag has no moral. It has a laugh, and the laugh takes a side.

The CommissionerI cannot ban a laugh. There is nowhere in article two to put it.

The RecordThe law still left a mark. The editor in the strip, Prunelle, swears in a word Franquin built from a Walloon oath, because a real oath could not be printed in a youth weekly.

No message, every target

The ReaderThe office boy got in the way of everything. Once you notice it, you cannot stop noticing it.

The EditorStart with the contract. A businessman, Monsieur De Mesmaeker, comes to the office to sign. Something always stops him. A gadget. A flood. A cat. The office boy.

The RecordThe running gag was suggested by the writer Greg. The contracts stay unsigned.

The CommissionerA contract is the foundation of commerce.

The ReaderIt was the funniest thing in the magazine.

The EditorThen the boss. First Fantasio, then from nineteen sixty-eight Prunelle, losing every argument with an office boy who never argues.

The EditorThen the uniform. The local policeman, Longtarin, and his parking meters. In the late seventies the strip went to war on parking meters, and the magazine printed stickers for its readers.

The RecordThe sticker read: you have paid to drive, now pay to stop.

The CommissionerChildren were handed stickers against municipal property.

The RecordFranquin took a clear stance against pollution, nuclear power, the arms race and the death penalty, with strong anti-militarist feelings. The gags followed him.

The RecordIn nineteen sixty-eight, according to the Centre Pompidou, the publisher received a letter from the authorities asking it to rein in his jabs at the police. In nineteen seventy-eight he drew a page for Amnesty International showing Gaston tortured and hanged.

The CommissionerThere. A political cartoonist, hiding in a children's magazine. I knew it.

The RecordIn nineteen seventy-nine Franquin was asked exactly that. His answer: he is neither a bourgeois nor an anarchist. Gaston is a scatterbrain, a clown. I have no cultural or political message to deliver.

The CommissionerThen I withdraw the charge.

The ReaderDon't. Take him at his word, and look at what your law actually asked.

The RecordArticle two never asked what an author meant. It asked what a page showed, and in what light.

The ReaderFor thirty years, a children's weekly showed a young man who would not work, would not obey, would not sign and would not salute. And it showed him as the one you liked.

The CommissionerWithout a message.

The EditorWithout a message. That's why it got through.

Gloves off

The EditorTwenty years in, we stopped smuggling.

The RecordLe Trombone illustré ran from the seventeenth of March to the twentieth of October, nineteen seventy-seven. Thirty issues, stapled inside the weekly as a supplement. Franquin and Delporte made it.

The CommissionerAnd the publisher?

The RecordThe publisher ended it.

The EditorA pirate paper, inside the magazine, in the children's hands. Of course they ended it. We knew they would.

The ReaderThat's where the black pages started. Idées noires. Dark ideas. Franquin drawing in ink with almost no colour at all.

The RecordWhen the supplement closed, the strip moved to Fluide Glacial, the adult humour monthly founded on the first of April, nineteen seventy-five, by Gotlib, Alexis and Jacques Diament. It ran there until May nineteen eighty-three.

The CommissionerAn adult magazine. Out of my jurisdiction, and out of reach of children. You see, the system works.

The ReaderThe dark pages needed an adult magazine. The office boy never did. He stayed exactly where you could not touch him, in the children's weekly.

The rest of the kiosk

The ReaderGaston was the quiet one. Walk along the rack, and you can see who paid for being loud.

The RecordLaziness was a political idea before it was a vice on a list. Paul Lafargue published The Right to Be Lazy in eighteen eighty.

The RecordBoris Vian. His novel I Shall Spit on Your Graves, published in nineteen forty-six under a false name, was banned in nineteen forty-nine. He was convicted of offending public morals in nineteen fifty and fined one hundred thousand francs.

The EditorAnd in nineteen fifty-four his song The Deserter, recorded by Mouloudji, was kept off French radio.

The RecordGeorges Brassens, The Gorilla, nineteen fifty-two. Kept off French radio and Radio Luxembourg. Europe One played it first, in nineteen fifty-five.

The CommissionerRadio is not my department. But I approve.

The RecordIn America, after Senate hearings in the spring of nineteen fifty-four, publishers adopted the Comics Code that October. MAD became a magazine in July nineteen fifty-five, and walked out from under the Code.

The EditorThe same move as Fluide Glacial, twenty years earlier. Change the format and you change the rules.

The RecordJuly nineteen fifty-seven. The Situationist International is founded in a village in Italy. The same year as the footprints.

The ReaderAnd a Belgian, Raoul Vaneigem, later wrote an essay in praise of refined laziness. He died this summer, in Barcelona, aged ninety-two.

The RecordOctober nineteen fifty-eight, inside the same weekly: the Smurfs. Delporte went on to write many of their stories. October nineteen fifty-nine: the first issue of Pilote.

The RecordSeptember nineteen sixty: Hara-Kiri, founded by Cavanna and Georges Bernier, the Professeur Choron. Banned in nineteen sixty-one, and again in nineteen sixty-six.

The RecordNineteen sixty-four. Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella, banned for minors at once under the law of nineteen forty-nine. The nineteen sixty-eight printing was retouched at the censor's request.

The CommissionerThat one was on my desk. I stand by it.

The RecordNineteen sixty-nine. Léo Ferré records The Anarchists.

The RecordThe ninth of November, nineteen seventy. Charles de Gaulle dies. Four days later the weekly Hara-Kiri goes on sale with the front page: tragic ball at Colombey, one dead.

The CommissionerIndecent.

The RecordOn the seventeenth of November the Minister of the Interior banned it from sale to minors, from display and from advertising, using the youth law of nineteen forty-nine.

The EditorThe children's law, used to shut down an adult paper for a joke about a dead general. So the team changed the name. The first issue of Charlie Hebdo is dated the twenty-third of November.

The RecordThen the adult magazines arrive. L’Écho des savanes in nineteen seventy-two. Metal Hurlant and Fluide Glacial in nineteen seventy-five.

The ReaderThe loud ones built magazines a child could not buy.

The EditorAnd the office boy stayed on the rack at child height, every week, and nobody banned him at all.

Under contract

The RecordAndré Franquin was born in Etterbeek in nineteen twenty-four, and died on the fifth of January, nineteen ninety-seven.

The ReaderHis daughter, Isabelle Franquin, says he told her himself that he did not want anyone else to draw Gaston.

The RecordThe publisher announced a new Gaston album for October twenty twenty-two. She went to court. In May twenty twenty-two, before a Brussels judge, the publisher undertook to print nothing until an arbitrator ruled.

The RecordThe award came on the thirtieth of May, twenty twenty-three. It rested on a contract signed in nineteen ninety-two. The publisher may continue Gaston. It must consult her and report to her every six months, and she may object to anything that distorts the work.

The CommissionerA contract. Signed, dated, enforceable. Finally, something in this business I understand.

The RecordThe Return of Lagaffe, drawn by Delaf, came out on the twenty-second of November, twenty twenty-three. The announced print run was one point two million copies. Livres Hebdo reported eight hundred thousand printed, and it topped the sales chart in its first week.

The ReaderShe didn't endorse it. Her words: I cannot go against the will of the author.

The EditorMonsieur De Mesmaeker spent decades trying to get one contract signed, and the office boy made sure he never did.

The CommissionerAnd laziness came off my list in May twenty eleven.

The ReaderTwelve years later, the laziest man in comics went back to work. On a contract.

The EditorSigned in nineteen ninety-two. By people who weren't him.

The RecordEvery source for this is listed at the end of the page, and every one of them is linked.

The EditorIf something here is wrong, it is wrong in the record, and we would want to know. The corrections address is in the footer.

The ReaderThis was La Paresse. A Feline Union publication.

Sources
  1. Loi n° 49-956 du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse, 1949 text of articles 2 and 3: “Annexe”, Enfance, vol. 6, no. 5, 1953. persee.fr
  2. Same law, version in force 1954–2010 (amended by loi n° 54-1190 du 29 novembre 1954): legifrance.gouv.fr; current version (article 2 rewritten by loi n° 2011-525 du 17 mai 2011, art. 46): legifrance.gouv.fr
  3. Europe Comics, on censorship and Belgian comics. europecomics.com
  4. “La Loi du 16 juillet 1949 a 60 ans”, ActuaBD. actuabd.com
  5. “André Franquin”, Lambiek Comiclopedia (Gaston’s debut and first gags, De Mesmaeker, parking meters, politics, Le Trombone illustré, Idées noires, dates of birth and death). lambiek.net
  6. “Yvan Delporte”, Lambiek Comiclopedia. lambiek.net
  7. “Spirou”, Lambiek Comiclopedia (Dupuis, 1898; Spirou no. 1, 21 April 1938). lambiek.net
  8. “Gaston, un rebelle en espadrilles”, Centre Pompidou (the 1968 letter). centrepompidou.fr
  9. Vincent Brunner, “Gaston, gaffeur venu du futur”, Slate.fr, 7 December 2016 (Franquin’s 1979 interview with Daan Delannoy; the 1978 Amnesty page). archived copy
  10. Numa Sadoul, Et Franquin créa la gaffe, 1986; reissued by Glénat in 2022 as Et Franquin créa Lagaffe.
  11. Paul Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse, 1880. marxists.org
  12. “Comics Code History: The Seal of Approval”, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. cbldf.org
  13. “L’écrivain belge Raoul Vaneigem, figure de Mai 68, est décédé à 92 ans”, RTBF. rtbf.be
  14. Université de Lille, HAL open archive, on the 1949 law and Barbarella. hal.univ-lille.fr
  15. “Dupuis pourra exploiter les droits de Gaston Lagaffe, mais seulement selon certaines conditions”, La Libre Belgique, 31 May 2023. lalibre.be
  16. “À la veille du retour de Gaston Lagaffe, Isabelle Franquin réagit”, ActuaLitté. actualitte.com
  17. “Un Delaf sachant gaffer”, Livres Hebdo, 30 November 2023. livreshebdo.fr

Gaston Lagaffe and every character named here belong to their rights holders. This publication is independent and has no connection with Dupuis or the Franquin family.

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