The father of the comic strip “Les Tuniques Bleues”, Raoul Cauvin, is dead

The father of the “Blue Tunics” bows out. Belgian comic book writer Raoul Cauvin died Thursday August 19 at the age of 82, three months after revealing that he had an incurable cancer, announced Dupuis, his publishing house. He had built his notoriety on this series which has sold millions of copies in fifty years of existence, as well as on the youth series “Cédric”.

“It is with great emotion that we inform you of the death of Raoul Cauvin, one of the greatest men in the world of comics,” the publisher said early Friday in a statement.

“We are in thought with […] the millions of readers who adored his humor and his situational comedy through the publication of his series, “he added.

The series “The Blue Tunics” tells with humor the adventures of two American soldiers, a convinced militarist and another engaged in spite of himself, who fight the “Southerners” during the Civil War (1861-1865).

With over 15 million albums sold in French – not counting translations into English, German, Dutch, etc. -, these Laurels and Hardy comics have introduced the conflict to a good number of Europeans.

This popular success pushed Cauvin to become a prolific author for his publisher Dupuis, collaborating with many other cartoonists: among others Berck (“Sammy et Lou”), Nic (“Spirou et Fantasio”) or Kox (“L’Agent 212 “).

At the start, at the turn of the 1970s, the Belgian screenwriter worked with Claire Bretécher (1940-2020) on a series – “Les Naufragés” – the boards of which were first published in the Journal de Spirou.

“If he excels in the humorous adventure for all audiences and all forms of visual gagging, he evolved in the 1980s towards more incisive productions, often close to black humor and delusional parody”, affirms the biography communicated by Dupuis.

It is the time of the series “Pierre Tombal” with Hardy, “Women in white” on the universe of the hospital (with Bercovici in the drawing), but also “Cédric” (Laudec) which turns out to be a success of youth comics with 34 albums to date.

Raoul Cauvin was born on September 26, 1938 in Antoing, in the west of Belgium, near the French border: the same year in which the magazine “Spirou” was created, where he would later publish his plates. He studied advertising lithography at the Institut Saint-Luc de Tournai, one of the most renowned art schools in Belgium, before joining Dupuis.

He created “Les Tuniques Bleues” in 1968, eight years after his debut at the publisher as a letterer, then as a cameraman in the Cartoons department.

“Go up there”

He first designed his two heroes – Sergeant Cornelius Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch – with the designer Louis Salvérius, who died in 1972 and gave way to Willy Lambil.

The latter remains Cauvin’s inseparable accomplice until volume 64, the final album signed by the screenwriter, released by Dupuis in May 2021.

Cauvin and Lambil, whom AFP had met in Belgium in 2012, were nicknamed “comic strip grandpas”, with the same graying mustache.

“Forty years after our debut, we are in the third generation of readers. It’s wonderful to think that the same album can be read by a grandfather, a father and his children”, enthusiastically Raoul Cauvin. .

Between 1990 and 2009, Cauvin signed with the designer William Taï, alias Malik (died in December 2020), 21 albums of Cupid, a figure borrowed from Roman mythology, shooting his arrows of love through and through.

For Patrick Gaumer, who had devoted a comic to him (“Cauvin the monograph”, published at the end of 2013), the screenwriter brilliantly handled “a malicious verb” characterized by four ingredients: “distance, humor, zany and self-deprecation”.

At the beginning of May 2021, a few days after the release of the last album of “Tuniques bleues”, Cauvin announced that he was suffering from incurable cancer, in a message on “Le blog à Raoul”, his personal website hosted on spirou.com.

“The oncologist is clear. A few more months to live before going up there to join all those who came before me. It had to happen to me one day too,” he wrote, not without humor.

“Raoul Cauvin has become a veritable statue of Commander of the screenwriters. Popular, irresistibly funny, unexpected […], it has durably codified the mechanics of the gag and the canons of the humorous adventure, seducing several generations of readers and selling more than 50 million albums “, insisted Dupuis on Friday.

With AFP