Quick and Flupke on show!

Just a few months after Tintin and Snowy made their first appearance in Le Petit Vingtième, Hergé created something new to appeal to the supplement’s young readers. In just two pages a week, his newest characters Quick and Flupke quickly won them over with their pranks and jokes.

When publication of Le Petit Vingtième ended in May 1940, Hergé recreated some of their exploits for the Dutch daily newspaper Het Algemeen Nieuws and later the brand new Tintin magazine. Finally, once their adventures had been created in colour, a series of pocket albums were released.

Quick and Flupke were inspired by the comic strip tradition of creating escapades pitting children against adults such as those featuring Max and Moritz (Wilhelm Busch, 1865) and Hans and Fritz from The Katzenjammer Kids (Rudolph Dirks, 1897). In Hergé’s body of work, the boys from Brussels were the antithesis of valiant Tintin’s globetrotting adventures with his chatterbox dog.

By mostly stripping the tales back to the bare bones, Hergé was able to give his humour free rein in the two rascals’ quips. It also gave him the opportunity to develop his extraordinarily inventive illustrations to the extent that he was sometimes able to create jokes without any dialogue at all and experiment with the very rules of the comic strip genre.

Under the ambiguous gaze of Agent 15, a seemingly naive yet wily police officer, this exhibition offers an insight into Hergé’s characters and the production of Quick and Flupke’s adventures throughout the 1930s.

In contrast to the gallery’s normal modus operandi, nothing from this exhibition is for sale.