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Pictures and Texts in Children’s Newspapers
The Italian paper Jumbo was first published in France in 1935, a year after
Le Journal de Mickey hit the market, but it did not became a top seller until
its look was updated and its content was changed to include several popu-
lar American strips in 1939 (Crépin 2001: 49). On the eve of the war Jumbo
was still focused primarily on entertainment, but it already differed from Le
Journal de Mickey in one important respect: it regularly ran several strips that
portrayed the Germans as enemies. Was it because the editor of Jumbo was
Italian, and therefore perhaps more sensitive to the political tensions of the
drôle de guerre [strange war], that his weekly was politicized early on? One
of those strips was “Au service de la patrie” [In the Service of the Home-
land]—an explicitly anti-German saga whose main character, Michel Fran-
coeur [Michel Trueheart] (his name alludes to his Frenchness), the son of a
World War I hero, escapes all attacks by the enemy and makes them look like
fools (Guillot 1991: 20). Two months before the Occupation, in Jumbo of
April 20, 1940, we find Francoeur and his mother paying their respects at
the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe before the former
leaves on a secret mission for the French government. In the same issue there
is a small strip about two characters named “Bouboule” and “Frisaplat” who
are escaping from German soldiers. The remainder of the issue of April 20
copied the features of its biggest competitor by offering eight American strips
6
and various rubrics similar to those found in the noncolor pages of Le Journal
de Mickey. To ensure a faithful readership among children drawn to the “ex-
oticism” of America, Jumbo’s nameplate declared it to be the “Paper of the Far
West,” and this subtitle was written with the lasso of the Lone Ranger, whose
image adorns the upper left-hand corner (figure 2). Unsurprisingly, the overt
American features of Le journal de Mickey and Jumbo became problematic
during the Occupation, and were dropped or modified, as we shall see.
The third paper in our study—the weekly Coeurs vaillants—had a very
different mission: it undertook to teach its readers to be morally upright,
model citizens and, most importantly, good Catholics. The editors of Coeurs
vaillants positioned their “100 percent French weekly” as the patriotic alter-
native to the scandalous foreign press even before the Occupation, but they
did not shy away from occasional format changes to put it on a more equal
footing with that press. For example, Coeurs vaillants was the first weekly in
France to publish a science fiction strip on its cover (Crépin 2001: 38).
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The
paper also had the loyal collaboration of the Belgian Hergé, who contributed
a selection of his immensely popular Tintin comics, and of a young French
comic artist whose popular strip “Jim Boum” was signed “Marijac.” As we
shall see, Marijac’s decision to have his character play a patriotic, anti-German