Giggle Comic's Belgian Connection

My post about IPC's Giggle Comic is up on the Forbidden Planet International Blog. Giggle was a pretty unadventurous looking comic that eventually merged with Buster, but it had a secret, it contained artwork by two of Belgium's most famous cartoonists, a fact I wasn't aware of before I looked at the copy of Giggle on Allan Notton’s fantastic Comics UK site.

To be honest I was just going through all the scans there that caught my eye and I hadn't seen Giggle for yonks so in I dived and almost immediately I thought 'whoa, that's really, really, really, well drawn comic, very professional, and oddly familiar ' - and I was right to think that. The comic character IPC ran as Tammy Tuff was Benoit Brisefer the creation of Pierre Culliford, better known as Peyo, the cartoonist who created The Smurfs for the famous Belgian comic, Le Journal De Spirou.

And from the same issue, Buck Bingo was of course, as you have spotted, Lucky Luke, the creation of fellow Spirou artist, Maurice de Bevere (Morris) and more than likely it is an episode written by Asterix’s Rene Goscinny – who worked as the ‘scenarist’ on Morris’s series for many years.

I had wondered if Herlock Sholmes was also a Belgian creation, but Steve Holland, who writes the excellent Bear Alley blog, informs me that it is the work of Yugoslavian cartoonist Julio Radilovic - which just makes this little comic even more amazing for me.

Because I planned on becoming a cartoonist I used to copy the pages of comics like Giggle. In a way, I was also using my comics collection as a sort of correspondence course in cartooning. I had no idea though, that I was learning the tricks of the trade from not just Britain's best cartoonists, but the best cartoonists in Europe.