Le Journal de Spirou #0/1938

History

The magazine was conceived by Jean Dupuis, owner of a Catholic printing firm in the Walloon town of Marcinelle, near Charleroi, who by 1937 had decided to extend the Dupuis family's stable of periodicals into children's publishing. His son Charles, then around twenty years old, took charge as first editor-in-chief, and the family collectively settled on the name 'Spirou' — a Walloon word for squirrel that also connoted a lively, mischievous young boy. Parisian artist Robert Velter (pen name Rob-Vel), who had prior experience as an assistant to American strip cartoonist Martin Branner, was commissioned to create the title character; he modeled the hotel setting on the Moustic Hotel in Brussels, a playful nod to the Dupuis flagship magazine Le Moustique. The debut issue launched as an eight-page large-format tabloid mixing Rob-Vel's original Belgian strips with licensed American reprints, and a Dutch-language edition called Robbedoes followed eight months later in October 1938.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Cover date: 21 April 1938 — the GCD catalogs this as issue #0/1938, the very first entry in the Le Journal de Spirou series published by Éditions Dupuis.
• First appearance of Spirou: the red-uniformed bellhop character debuted on the cover of #0/1938 (with an in-character letter), while the first interior comic story, 'La Naissance de Spirou' ('The Birth of Spirou'), ran in issue #1/1938 the same day — the character literally leaps off a painter's canvas into life in that strip.
• Creator: French artist Robert Velter (pen name Rob-Vel) drew and signed the Spirou strips from 1938 to 1943; his friend and collaborator Luc Lafnet may have contributed artwork to early installments, including the founding birth story, though Velter held sole byline credit.
• The debut issue was an eight-page large-format tabloid mixing original Belgian strips — including Rob-Vel's 'Bibor et Tribar,' Blanche Dumoulin and Luc Lafnet's 'Les Aventures de Zizette,' and Fernand Dineur's 'Les Aventures de Tif' — alongside American licensed reprints such as Superman (Siegel and Shuster), Red Ryder, Brick Bradford, and Dick Tracy.
• The name 'Spirou' derives from the Walloon dialect term for 'squirrel,' which also carries the colloquial meaning of a lively or mischievous youngster — the name was chosen in a Dupuis family brainstorming session specifically to evoke youthful energy.
• Spirou's character was conceived as a bellhop at the fictional Moustique Hotel, a name that deliberately referenced the Dupuis family's pre-existing magazine Le Moustique; Spirou's red uniform remained his visual signature for decades even after the hotel setting was abandoned.
• A Flemish-language parallel edition, Robbedoes, was launched on 27 October 1938 — eight months after the French debut — marking an unusual bilingual publishing strategy that helped shape the development of Flemish comics alongside their Walloon counterparts.
• Dupuis purchased ownership of the Spirou character outright from Rob-Vel in 1943 — atypical in Franco-Belgian publishing where creators normally retained rights — meaning the series could thereafter be passed to successive artists, most notably Jijé (from 1943), then André Franquin (from 1946), whose tenures defined the character's enduring visual identity.

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