Quick & Flupke

The exploits of Quick and Flupke (French: Quick et Flupke, gamins de Bruxelles, lit. 'Quick and Flupke, urchins of Brussels') is a comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Serialised weekly from January 1930 to 1940 in Le Petit Vingtième, the children's supplement of conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle ("The Twentieth Century"), the series ran alongside Hergé's better known The Adventures of Tintin. It continued for one extra year in Le Soir Jeunesse until 1941.

It revolves around the lives of two misbehaving boys, Quick and Flupke, who live in Brussels, and the conflict that they get into with a local policeman.

In 1983, the series provided the basis for an animated television adaptation.

Abbé Norbert Wallez appointed Hergé editor of a children's supplement for the Thursday issues of Le Vingtième Siècle, titled Le Petit Vingtième ("The Little Twentieth"). Carrying strong Catholic and fascist messages, many of its passages were explicitly antisemitic. For this new venture, Hergé illustrated L'Extraordinaire Aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet (The Extraordinary Adventure of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Cochonnet), a comic strip authored by one of the paper's sport columnists, which told the story of two boys, one of their little sisters, and her inflatable rubber pig. Hergé was unsatisfied, and eager to write and draw a comic strip of his own. He was fascinated by new techniques in the medium – such as the systematic use of speech bubbles – found in such American comics as George McManus's Bringing up Father, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Rudolph Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids, copies of which had been sent to him from Mexico by the paper's reporter Léon Degrelle, stationed there to report on the Cristero War.

Hergé developed a character named Tintin as a Belgian boy reporter who could travel the world with his fox terrier, Snowy – "Milou" in the original French – basing him in large part on his earlier character of Totor and also on his own brother, Paul. Although Hergé wanted to send his character to the United States, Wallez instead ordered him to set his adventure in the Soviet Union, acting as a work of anti-socialist propaganda for children. The result, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, began serialisation in Le Petit Vingtième on 10 January 1929, and ran until 8 May 1930. Popular in Francophone Belgium, Wallez organized a publicity stunt at the Gare de Nord station, following which he organized the publication of the story in book form. The popularity of the story led to an increase in sales, and so Wallez granted Hergé two assistants, Eugène Van Nyverseel and Paul "Jam" Jamin.

According to one of Hergé's later recollections, he had returned to work following a holiday to find that the staff had publicly announced that he would be producing a new series, as a joke on his expense. Obliged to the commitment, he had to develop a new strip with only a few days notice. In devising a scenario, he was influenced by the French film Les Deux gosses ("The two kids"), released the previous year, as well as by his own childhood in Brussels. Other cinematic influences included the films of Charlie Chaplin, upon whom the policemen are based.

The strip first appeared in Le Petit Vingtième on 23 January 1930, at the time starring Quick without Flupke. Quick appeared on the cover of that issue, stating "Hello, friends. Don't you know me? I'm Quick, a kid from Brussels, and beginning today I'll be here every Thursday to tell you what happened to me during the week." Hergé borrowed the name "Quipke" from one of his friends. Three weeks later he added the second boy as a sidekick, naming him "Suske". He would soon be renamed "Flupke" ("Little Philip" in Flemish). Quick et Flupke would be published in Le Petit Vingtième every Thursday for the next six years. Hergé devoted little time to the series, typically only starting work on each strip on the morning of the day that the page were being typset, proceeding to rush to finish them within one or two hours. Jamin thought that Hergé had greater difficulty with Quick and Flupke than with The Adventures of Tintin, because of the need for a completely new idea each week.

Hergé used the strip as a vehicle for jokes not considered appropriate for The Adventures of Tintin. In particular he made repeated allusions to the fact that the strip was a cartoon; in one example, Flupke walks onto the ceiling, flies around, and then throws Quick's detached head into the air, before waking up to proclaim "Thank goodness it wasn't real! Hergé isn't still making us act like cartoons!" Hergé inserted himself into the strip on numerous occasions; in "The Kidnapping of Hergé", Quick and Flupke kidnap Hergé from his office, and force him to sign a statement proclaiming "I, the undersigned, Hergé, declare that, contrary to how I make it seem every week, the parties of Quick and Flupke are good, smart, obedient, etc., etc."