He was the father of the Blue Tunics. We also owe him Cedric and “Women in White”. Belgian screenwriter Raoul Cauvin died Thursday at the age of 82. He had revealed in May to be suffering from cancer.
Sold in millions of copies over the past fifty years, the comic book seriesThe blue tunics tells the funny 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).
Created in 1968 and translated into several languages, including English, German and Dutch, the comic book made many Europeans aware of the conflict.
“Popular, irresistibly funny, unexpected”
With this popular success Raoul Cauvin became a prolific author for his publisher, Dupuis. He has collaborated with many other designers: among others Berck (“Sammy and Lou”), Nic (“Spirou and Fantasio”) or Kox (“Agent 212”).
“Raoul Cauvin has become a veritable statue of Commander of 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 ”, wrote Dupuis in a press release.
At the beginning, at the turn of the 1970s, the Belgian screenwriter worked with Claire Bretécher on a series – The shipwrecked – whose plates were first published in Spirou’s journal.
“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.
“Distance, humor, zany and self-deprecation”
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 thirty-four albums to date.
For Patrick Gaumer, who had dedicated 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-mockery”.
At the beginning of May 2021, a few days after the release of the last “Blue tunics”, Cauvin announced that he had an incurable cancer, in a message on Raoul’s blog, his personal website hosted on spirou.com.
“The oncologist is categorical. 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.