Raoul Cauvin

Belgian humoristic comics writer (1938–2021)

Raoul Cauvin (kovɛ̃; 26 September 1938 – 19 August 2021) was a Belgian comics author and one of the most popular in the humorist field.

Cauvin's work was almost always humoristic, but he produced both long stories (i. e. 44 pages) and short gags (between half a page and 6 pages). He started mainly with historical series: Les Tuniques Bleues uses the American Civil War as background, while Sammy plays in the time of Al Capone and Eliot Ness, and Les Mousquetaires describes the adventures of three musketeers in the 17th century. But with Agent 212 (French for "Officer 212"), featuring a rather stupid cop, he started to make his stories more contemporary, and in the 1980s he breached increasingly taboo subjects and introduced more critical views with themes like nursing and hospitals in Les Femmes en Blanc ("The Women in White") with Philippe Bercovici, Les Paparazzi or gravediggers in Pierre Tombal. Although best known for Les Tuniques Bleues, he and Lambil also worked on a comics series called Pauvre Lampil ("Poor Lampil"), a semi autobiographical account of the trials and tribulations of a melancholic comic strip artist and his love hate relationship with his scriptwriter, caricatures of Lambil and Cauvin themselves. In fact, aside from Lambil (whose name is changed to "Lampil"), other characters, including their colleagues in the comic book industry, are referred to by their real or pen names: Cauvin himself, Fournier, Franquin etc. Cauvin also took up more fantastic themes like that of a love angel in Cupido or the hard life of a vulture falling in love with an owl in Les Voraces. and he also made a few comics completely on his own, but with limited success.

His works are often seen as more artisanal than artistic by the critics, while others consider him an uncontested master of the humoristic comic. Whatever the critics think of him though, he continues to be very successful with the public and sought after by artists, at one stage writing almost a dozen series at a time. In 2006 alone, he had six series in the list of best selling new comics of the ACBD, with Cédric securing the fourth spot with 288,900 albums and Les Tuniques Bleues at ten with 184,800 copies. His other most successful comics were Les Femmes en Blanc (78,000 copies), Agent 212 (66,000 copies), Les Psy (51,500 copies) and Pierre Tombal (45,700 copies). In 2010, he was the 7th bestselling author of comics in France, with sales of 569,000 copies that year. As a thank you from the publisher Dupuis, Spirou magazine no. 3676, published 24 September 2008, was, in connection to Cauvin's 70th birthday, made as a tribute to Cauvin, where nearly half of the magazine consists of tributes to Cauvin as comics, artwork or articles.