Spirou orphelin de la Shoah

Emile Bravo resurrected Spirou in Le Journal d’un ingénu in Citation2008. It was followed, ten years later, with L’Espoir malgré tout (Bravo Citation2018), a comics series described by some critics as “the most important written on the Holocaust since Art Spiegelman’s Maus” (Pasamonik Citation2023, 9). In the “retro” comics (Pellegrin Citation2021) that revisit Spirou’s wartime years—including Le groom vert de gris (Yann and Schwartz Citation2009), Fantasio se marie (Feroumont Citation2016), and Pacific Palace (Durieux Citation2021)—, children feature prominently. This article examines how Spirou’s relationship with children, particularly those orphaned by the war and deported to the death camps by the Nazis, helps to reconfigure the hero’s profile and redefine the adventure genre. Bringing together history and memory, this work of fiction maintains, in a graphic style that blurs the “ligne claire” (Beaty Citation2011, 207), a critical dialogue not only with the “Spirou archive” (Crucifix and Pedro Citation2019) but also with the narrative tradition of Franco-Belgian comics which is characterized by the hegemony of the adventure genre

Art · The Holocaust · Theology · Cultural Identity and Heritage · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research