By announcing a resumption of the adventures of the character of Franquin against the advice of his daughter Isabelle, the Dupuis editions create a beautiful controversy for the opening of the festival in Angoulême.
“We are within our rights, we have a contract signed by an author in full possession of his means.” Strange return to Angoulême for its former artistic director, Stéphane Beaujean, who as editorial director of Dupuis editions finds himself publicly defending, on the first day of the festival (FIBD), the choice to relaunch the adventures of Gaston Lagaffe against the opinion of Isabelle Franquin, the daughter of the designer who disappeared in 1997. Announced on Wednesday, this resurrection entrusted to the Quebec designer Delaf is presented as an exercise in style, an ultra-referenced immersion in the design and tempo of Franquin rather than as a vision personal.
Former bookseller, former journalist, fine connoisseur of the environment and the market, Beaujean seems to have been working for two years on several fronts. Picking up big names in alternative comics to add them to the Dupuis catalog (Simon Hanselmann, for example, whose Crisis Zone coming out soon), and by installing others at the helm of historical series (Sophie Guerrive on Spirou and Fantasio), or by attempting more acrobatic bridges by entrusting a Spanish artist with the task of creating a modern saga from the characters of Osamu Tezuka.
Awkward situation
The idea is to dust off forgotten icons, to ensure that a new generation seizes emblems of the history of comics. To think of the house catalog as in the film or video game industries, in terms of‘IP, of intellectual property that must be kept alive at all costs. Trying to revive a trait or electroshocking him to shake up a traditional comic in the future that he didn’t see rosy.
In the Gaston case, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable situation of opposition between law and morality. “Indeed, Isabelle Franquin did not want a resumption of the character of her father. Dupuis editions have the publishing rights that were assigned to us by Franquin in the 90s in a contract that seems very clear, all the more clear that it mentions clauses that we do not see at that time. there, the authors not projecting themselves at that time, so far into the future, he explained during a conference at the FIBD. Clauses which cede the rights of the characters and which authorize the resumptions.
Already opposed to the film adaptation of her father’s work, Isabelle Franquin had not managed to prevent the release of the purge of Pierre-François Martin-Laval, in 2018. It is not known what will happen to the dispute which opposes it today to Dupuis but with a print run forecast at 1.2 million copies, the reader will have no other choice but to find it everywhere on its way, such a bet aiming to obliterate any competition on bookstore and supermarket displays. A big win for comics, for sure.