And it's a man whose name will probably not be famailiar with you guys but His creations are world famous. Yvan Delporte was the chief editor of the Spirou comic magazine in the fifties and sixties and is considered one of the grandmasters of the seventh art in Europe. Not because of his comics (he couldn't draw to save his life) but because of his uncanny ability to come up with amazingly thought through scenarios and legendary comic figures.
It was Yvan Delporte who together with Pierre Culiford (Otherwise known as "Peyo") created a community of perculiar dwarfs for the album "The six holed fluit" in the Johan and Peewit series. Little did they know that those side figures would turn out to become legendary comic figures themselves.
But by far the most proliffic coleboration between Delporte and an artist was when he worked together with another legendary cartoon artist, Andre Franquin, on the "Spirou et Fantasio" series. Delporte came up with a scenario for a story called "the inheritance" in which Spirou and Fantasio travel to south America to capture an illusive animal. While Spirou and Fantasio is a series that never made it in the USA, the particullar animal Delporte came up with became a legend worldover.
One of the greatest moments in comicbook history came in 1957 when Franquin came up to Delporte and said "Yvan, did it ever occur to you that every character in (Spirou) our magazine has a profession? Buck Danny is a pilot, Johan and Peewit are knights, Lucky Luke is a cowboy. Why don't we have somebody that's just hanging around, who's a bit of a beatnick, who cannot be bothered to work at all?" to which Delporte said "I know somebody like that, his name is Gaston." and thus the seeds for the most legendary cartoon figure to come out of the Spirou class were sown.
Gaston Lagaffe (the last name when broken down means "Blunder") was both legendary in the way that the rules of cartooning were changed and in the way he was drawn. Franquin who by then was already an Icon in European cartooning, changed his style to a much more outspoken way of drawing, wild lines and round shapes as opposed to his earlier work where everything was really angluar and evenly drawn out. The style in which Gaston Lagaffe was drawn became the benchmark for many cartoonist wanting to make a name for themselves.
Yvan Delporte in my opinion deserves to be named in books about art history along side the artists he helped along. Yvan Delporte died last year and I tip my hat to him.
