Spirou (magazine)

Spirou
Spirou No. 1 (21 April 1938) Front cover by Rob-Vel.
Publication information
Publisher	Dupuis
Schedule	Weekly
Publication date	21 April 1938 – present
Main character(s)	Spirou

Spirou magazine (French: Le Journal de Spirou) is a weekly Franco-Belgian comics magazine published by the Dupuis company. First published 21 April 1938, it was an eight-page weekly comics magazine composed a mixture of short stories and gags, serial comics, and a handful of American comics, of which the most popular series would be collected as albums by Dupuis afterwards.

With the success of the weekly magazine Le Journal de Mickey in France, and the popularity of the weekly Adventures of Tintin in Le Petit Vingtième, many new comic magazines or youth magazines with comics appeared in France and Belgium in the second half of the 1930s. In 1936, the experienced publisher Jean Dupuis put his sons Paul and the 19-year-old Charles in charge of a new magazine aimed at the juvenile market.

First appearing in April 1938, it was a large format magazine, available only in French and only in Wallonia. It introduced two new comics, the eponymous Spirou drawn by the young Frenchman Rob-Vel, and Les Aventures de Tif (later to become Tif et Tondu) drawn by Fernand Dineur, and printed American comics such as Superman, Red Ryder and Brick Bradford. on 27 October 1938 the Dutch edition named Robbedoes appeared as well.

Spirou and Robbedoes soon became very popular and the magazine doubled its pages from 8 to 16. After the invasion of the Germans, the magazine gradually had to stop publishing American comics. They were at first continued by local artists and later replaced with new series. When Rob-Vel no longer had the possibility to send his pages from France to Belgium on a regular basis either, his series was continued by Joseph Gillain, a young artist who had previously worked for Petits Belges and used the pen name Jijé. Together with Dineur and Sirius (pen name of Max Mayeu), they filled the magazine with a number of new series and increased the popularity of it even further.