Gaston Lagaffe

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Gaston Lagaffe is arguably one of the best-known and most well-liked characters of the French-Belgian comics school. The creation of Andre Franquin, who wanted to come up with an Anti-Hero after working for years on the series Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston Lagaffe is an office drone and errand boy employed by a fictional version of the Dupuis publishing company.

But the point is that he never gets any work done, instead preferring to spend his work days cobbling together mad contraptions, playing music on xenophones, or conducting chemical experiments that usually end with the explosion of his makeshift lab. He has a platonic but reciprocated relationship with fellow Dupuis employee Mademoiselle "Mam'zelle" Jeanne.

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Tropes used in Gaston Lagaffe include:

• The Alleged Car: Gaston's car is an old jalopy Fiat 509 that barely holds together and can be outraced by pedestrians.
  • It also emits more thick black smoke than a coal-fueled locomotive and on one occasion loses enough oil that someone can waterski while being pulled by it.
  • On one occasion, Gaston's homemade fuel additive turned that smoke blue and occasional engine backfires left behind something that looked like the result of the explosion of a water balloon filled with blue paint.
• Amusing Injuries
• The Animated Series
• Anti-Hero: Gaston is a textbook example.
• Anti-Villain: Agent Longtarin, the closest thing Gaston has to an archenemy, is just a regular traffic cop charged with enforcing the law, which Gaston often breaks openly. However, there are times when he gets a bit vindictive, giving Gaston a ticket for his car on a no-parking zone, then another for the soapbox racer he was unloading, then a third one for the roller-skate that fell out of the racer, doing a Happy Dance as writes the ticket. Once, he stopped Gaston in the street to ticket him for various faults on the car, and then added a parking ticket because the car was parked in the street. Considering that Gaston loves tormenting him with practical jokes revolving around parking meters that occasionally seem to drive him on borders of neurosis, he probably deserves a little payback.
• Art Evolution: Gaston basically becomes increasingly Super-Deformed throughout the series, his nose gets bigger, and his eyes acquire whites (having previously just been little dots), and the art style becomes a bit more detailed.
• Ascended Extra
  • Gaston Lagaffe started out as a recurring minor character for one-panel gags in Spirou before acquiring his own proper series.
  • Also Prunelle and Lebrac who were originally only two unnamed fellow employees of Gaston.
• Author Tract: Several of the strips expound Franquin's position on such issues as pollution and whaling. Gaston has also appeared in a promotional ad strip for Amnesty International in which Gaston has a nightmare of being a tortured political prisoner. It's as awful as you think. Given that Franquin is also the creator of the extremely depressing Idees Noires (Dark Thoughts), this isn't really surprising.
• Black and Gray Morality: It is a bit difficult to know who is the victim between Longtarin and Gaston because both seem to be a sadistic pleasure in ruining the life of his opponent.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Gaston once made a hot sauce that burned through the cup he kept it in, and sent the cartoonist Yves Lebrac screaming up the walls after a little taste. A later attempt resulted in the sauce bursting out of the jar it was kept in and crawling forth like protoplasm, dissolving the carpeting as it slithered on it.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Several times, notably to address the issue of the missing fifth album in the series.
• Brilliant but Lazy: Gaston, of course, although too inept to be a perfect example of the trope.
• Brother Chuck
  • Fantasio stopped appearing around the time Franquin gave up on writing Spirou. He did make a guest appearance in a later episode, but it took Gaston only five minutes to make him leave again, red with anger. (Gaston had painted his whole office green, including his desk, his typewriter and his pipe.)
  • Fantasio appeared once again later on, when Gaston came all the way to Champignac to show off the snow plow he had added to his car. Fantasio being completely wrapped up in warm clothing is difficult to identify.
  • There's been also a cartoonist who was friend with Gaston. He disappeared after a few appearances.
• Brown Note: Once re-tuned a violin to the point that playing it knocked the listeners out.
  • His Gaffophone has this result as well, making animals manically depressed and driving plants to suicide.
• Bungling Inventor: Gaston
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Gaston considers himself this, but those rare inventions that would benefit his company have a 100% backfire rate, as opposed to the 95% backfire rate of his other inventions. And the backfire is often quite literal, and in the office building, so...
• Butt Monkey: Everybody.
• Catch Phrase: In the original French, Gaston's catch phrase is "M'enfin?"; Prunelle's is "Rogntudju!"; and De Mesmaeker's is "Les signerai jamais!"
  • M'enfin? is a contracted form of Mais enfin? (loosely, "What the heck?"). Rogntudju! is the highly deformed version of Nom de Dieu! ("Goddammit!"). Les signerai jamais! means "I'll never sign them!" (i.e., the contracts).
  • In Le Journal De Spirou, he also had "C'est la dernière fois que je présente une première page!" ("It's the last time I appear on the first page") whenever said first page depicted him in an uncomfortable situation.
  • In German, Prunelle's is translated as "Hrrgttnchml!", which is the vowelless version of "Goddammit!", roughly speaking.
  • The Swedish translation actually retains the original, presumably because it sounds funny, or possibly because no-one considered that it's supposed to mean anything.
  • In the Dutch translation, it's "Grretvrrrdrie!", which is a highly mangled form of "Godverdomme!", a Dutch curse equivalent to "Goddammit!" (It literally means "God damn me!".). "M'enfin?" became "Nou Moe?" (very untranslatable) and "Les signerai jamais!" became "Ik teken ze nooit" (the same meaning).
• Cats Are Mean: Subverted. Gaston's cat, besides the obvious tendency to cause trouble inherent to anything that comes into contact with Gaston, has nothing as far as foulness of character goes, on the guy's "domesticated" seagull.
• Characterization Marches On: In the oldest gags, Gaston is totally moron instead to be just clueless and he is lack of energy. Later, he is still lazy but can be energetics when he does things he enjoys like cooking or inventing.
• Character Title: The French albums of the comic are simply titled Gaston.
• Chew Toy: Both Gaston's manager Prunelle and businessman De Mesmaeker often end up injured as a consequence of Gaston's ideas. Not to mention the poor Longtarin.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Occurs with a Panicky Expectant Father.
• Clothes Make the Legend: Gaston's green sweater. His blue espadrilles could also count, as they were orange in the beginning but their color was changed by the readers' wishes.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Gaston
• Comedic Sociopathy: Especially in older comics, Gaston is often horrified that, say, his bowling ball may have been damaged in a collision with a coworkers skull.
• Comically Missing the Point: A notable episode has Gaston wanting to install a wood gas generator on his car, "to save resources and pollute less" . But when his first design doesn't work, he then invents a gasoline-powered wood gas generator, even claiming that "It's as if I had a huge carburetor!".
• The Comically Serious: Most of Gaston's fellow employees are serious people who just want to do their jobs. At the far end of the scale, Mr. Boulier is the dapper, pernickety accountant who resents Gaston as a massive source of unplanned expenditures.
• Completely Different Title: The main character gets a local name in some translations, so the title of the comic changes to reflect this fact. He is called Guust Flater in Dutch, Tomás el Gafe in Spanish, Sergi Grapes in Catalan, Viggo in Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic, Niilo Pielinen in Finnish, Gaša Šeprtlja in Serbian and Şapşal Gazi in Turkish.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: Gaston's custom recipes are so weird, just hearing him describe them is enough to induce nausea. Strangely enough, some people are actually curious to taste his cooking (such as strawberry cod, whose main problem is apparently the cooking odors).
• Crashing Dreams: Happens repeatedly to Gaston during a dream he has of being stranded on a desert island with Moiselle Jeanne. Office chores keep intruding into the dream in the strangest ways.
• The Ditz: Gaston is lovably clueless, as are his buddies Jules-de-chez-Smith-en-face and Bertrand Labévue.
• DIY Disaster: Whenever Gaston attempts to "fix" something in the office.
  • He made water spray from a heater, turned a fridge into a pressure cooker, made a motorcycle ride in reverse, switched around all the keys on a typewriter and once launched a boiler into orbit.
  • He also once redid the plumbing for the heaters in order to use them as coffeemakers.
  • He once made a radio-controlled model plane from Russian transistor parts. The plane worked fine, it's just that he somehow also managed to make a Russian space station pull off the exact same stunts as the plane....
• Dreadful Musician: Gaston's music, when played on his homemade instruments, typically result in serious structural damage to buildings. Even playing a mere guitar does not fail to arouse unexpected consequences.
  • A particularly hilarious story had Gaston hook his guitar up to a radio emitter, to play a song for Jeanne at home. Unfortunately, the bridge-building company next door was using a computer to plan out a bridge that turned out like an LSD nightmare.
  • His homemade harp-like Gaffophone seems to be the source of the damage rather than Gaston's lack of skill, as Fantasio once did serious structural damage after shoving Gaston in and playing like a madman. Fantasio stated that Gaston's head lodged in gave the instrument "exceptional sonority".
  • In another, he re-tunes a friend's violin. Playing it knocks out all who hear it except him (it is even referred to as a Kiai).
• Dream Sequence: Gaston gets several, most of them interrupted by the sudden intrusion of Real Life; and on one occasion, he gets a shared dream with Moiselle Jeanne. Longtarin also gets his own Dream Sequence, in which parking meters are destroyed in various creative ways.
• Drives Like Crazy: Good thing that Gaston's car is so slow.
• Duct Tape for Everything: On one occasion, Gaston caused Prunelle to end up entangled in duct tape when he unwound an entire roll to see how long it was. On another occasion, a roll of heavy-duty tape stuck to his leg caused him to trail behind him assorted office implements, as well as Prunelle sitting on his wheeled chair. But Gaston's most catastrophic use of duct tape was when he tried to seal a leaking gas pipe with it, causing his office to blow up.
• The Eeyore: Gaston's other buddy, Bertrand. Since Franquin himself also dealt with depressions, also a case of Write What You Know.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin
  • Gaston's friend Jules-de-chez-Smith-en-face (Jules-who-works-at-Smith-across-the-street) is a guy named Jules, who "works" (just like Gaston "works") at Smith's on the other side of the street.
  • As are Lagaffe and Labévue (gaffe and bévue basically mean screw-up).
• Exploding Closet: Justified, if Gaston bothers to clean up his office at all, he does so by putting a filing cabinet on the ground and shoveling all the junk in. When Prunelle opens the cabinet to inspect...
• The Faceless: Mr. Dupuis, owner of the publishing company, may be heard on the phone or at best briefly glimpsed, but his face is never shown. But that is probably because he is an actual person....
• Failure Is the Only Option: De Mesmaeker and his contracts.
• Feathered Fiend: Gaston's seagull is sadistic at best, and downright dangerous when in a really foul mood. Being pecked with a beak strong enough to be used as a can opener hurts.

"Hi-hi-hi-HIAAARRRR!!!"

• Flanderization: Originally, Longtarin was just a normal cop who giving tickets when Gaston parked wrong. At the end, he loves giving tickets to Gaston. Though it could also be considered Character Development: Longtarin fines Gaston, Gaston retaliates with his practical jokes, and soon Longtarin is seeking revenge in return.
• Follow That Car!: Played with when Fantasio asks a cab driver to "follow that coat!"
• Friend to All Living Things: Gaston can get just about any animal to like him and do tricks (he arm-wrestles with an elephant). The only exception is an owl who kept him up all night hooting; he retaliated by playing guitar all day.
• Full Name Ultimatum: Prunelle gives one to cartoonist Yves Lebrac after his attempt to destroy the Gaffophone with termite backfires, infecting the whole building with the termites after they ignore the instrument entirely and leaving it as the only intact piece of wood in the entire company.
• The Generic Guy: Bertje and Jef Van Schrijfboek.
• Genius Ditz: Gaston is actually quite good at tinkering (and computer programming, according to one episode) but lacking in everything else, including common sense.
• The Ghost: Gaston's Aunt Hortense is often alluded to but never seen in person.
• Glass-Shattering Sound: A result of the Gaffophone.
• Heavy Sleeper: Gaston is asleep most of the time when he's not causing disasters.
• Heroes Want Redheads: Jeanne
• Hypocritical Humor: Gaston is a militant ecologist and pacifist, but his cars emits more exhaust than a truck race and he often assembles working military-themed models (tanks and bombers) to demonstrate what they can do in Real Life.
  • Hilariously, he once put a giant balloon at the end of his exhaust pipe to catch all the gases, but afterwards he thought nothing of just emptying the balloon in the middle of a street! In result everybody in the general vicinity lost consciousness from carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Freddy "Fingers"
  • Even the office staff sees him as this, treating his burglaries as friendly visits in the morning when they inevitably find him captured (accidentally) by Gaston's inventions.
• In Name Only: The movie. Actually, it's not even in name only, because Franquin didn't want the names of the characters to be used.
• Jerkass: Mr. Boulier
• Just Eat Gilligan: One wonders how Gaston manages to keep his work despite him causing so much disasters that being fired would be the very, very least thing to do (it actually happened just once, and he gets it back).
• Karma Houdini: Gaston is rarely seen getting comeuppance for his numerous blunders that are sometimes actually disastrous. To be fair, Gaston is often injured and unlucky.
• Klatchian Coffee: Gaston's homemade coffee. One tiny cup got him so jittery that he was pulled over for drunk driving.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Several of Gaston's invention turns against him.
• Lethal Chef: While flambeeing crepe suzettes, he set fire to his orange liquor bottle that shot like a rocket and exploded only a few meters away from the french president's limousine (Gaston had used a presidential parade as distraction to circumvent a "no cooking in the office" order)
• Limited Wardrobe: Gaston's one and only outfit is a green turtleneck sweater, jeans, and frayed espadrille shoes.
• Love Makes You Dumb:For Jeanne, Gaston is a genius.
• MacGuffin: The Mesmaeker's contracts. We never learn what's in them (though it's implied advertising is involved), only that Gaston accidentally prevents them from being signed (or destroys them after the fact).
• Man Child: Gaston; sometimes Lebrac.
• Mean Boss: Fantasio and Prunelle. But considering how lazy and unproductive Gaston is, they pretty much have to be. Prunelle quickly realized that he cannot win, but the few times he does get back at Gaston, he shows that he is not without a sense of humor.
• Meaningful Name
  • Lagaffe is a transparent enough name even in English.
  • As for Labévue, it literally means "the blunder".
  • In the same vein, De Mesmaeker is another "mess-maker".
    • This one is a coincidence: De Mesmaeker is named after fellow comic book artist Jidéhem's father, because when Franquin introduced him, everybody thought the character looked like said father. Jidéhem is the French pronunciation of the letters J-D-M - Jean De Mesmaeker.
  • Also Jules-de-chez-Smith-en-face, which could easily be translated to "Jules-who-works-at-Smith's-from-across-the-street". Okay, it's not his real name, but he is never called anything else - and is actually referred as such by Gaston and all other characters. Even in narratives.
  • Longtarin is slang for "long nose".
• Meddlesome Patrolman: Longtarin
• The Millstone: Gaston always causes trouble with his ideas.
• The Movie: There was a live-action film based on the comic, called Fais gaffe à la gaffe ! It was an utter failure.
• No Name Given: Two examples: a cartoonist seeing in some gag and the recurring secretary and Lebrac's love interest (apparently, Franquin found a names for her, but has forgotten). Subverted with Jef. He is unnamed in the comics, but his identity is confirmed on the official website.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Mr. Boulier
• Office: Subverted in that while Gaston works in an office, he is a hindrance to any actual office work being done.
• Office Lady: Mam'zelle Jeanne.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Chemistry, cooking, rocket science (he once built one that had members of the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and representatives from other armies fighting over whose branch would get it), model building... Subverted in that he only has enough knowledge in each field to make spectacular explosions.
• Overly Polite Pals: In one strip, Fantasio encourages Gaston to be more polite. This leads to a major traffic jam when he and another car driver refuse to go first into a street, blocking up every car behind them.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: Gaston invents one of the "weak" type. It doesn't do anything; it just hops around and gets on his co-workers' nerves.
• Pink Elephants: Played with. Gaston once borrowed an elephant from the local zoo and gave him a pink paint job, in order to play a practical joke on a friend who drinks too much. The original edition of the gag failed due to a colorist's error: the elephant is red in the album.
• Plank Gag: Used in a few gags.
• Powder Trail: Gaston once leaves one with a leaking bag of homemade rocket fuel. It ends up torching De Mesmaeker's contracts.
• Professional Slacker: Gaston
• Progressively Prettier: Jeanne was originally meant to be homely and quite grotesque-looking, but she has evolved into becoming very pretty. Franquin never intended to make her permanent at first, but since all the (admittedly pretty) other office ladies either quit their jobs or had other romantic interests and she was the only one left, he decided to have her mature. She's more or less the same age as Gaston, and Franquin always said that his character was never older than 18.
• Required Spinoff Crossover: Spirou and Fantasio have made recurring appearances in the series, while Gaston has had cameos in a couple of Spirou and Fantasio adventures. Understandable, as he works in the same place they do - Franquin did decide to make Spirou and Fantasio less present in the journal before handing the characters off to Fournier. Gaston is referred to later on, by Tome & Janry notably.
• Ridiculously Human Rubber Doll: Gaston owns a life-sized rubber doll of himself that gets repeatedly mistaken for him, or vice versa. In the most extreme cases Fantasio once almost throws the real Gaston out of the window, mistaking him for the puppet, and another time gets arrested for murder in the act of disposing it, and it takes the coroner hours to notice that something is amiss.
• Rugby Is Slaughter: Gaston briefly gives rugby a try but gives up after getting repeatedly and violently tackled. He decides to go home to the quietness of his beloved pets... who promptly proceed to wrestle a can of food off him, rugby-style.
• Running Gag
  • After more than 40 years, De Mesmaeker NEVER managed to successfully sign those goddamn contracts, as every single attempt had been thwarted by Lagaffe's antics.
    • On the few occasion when he has, he either actually signed something else, or Gaston destroyed them after the fact.
    • Once he took liking in one of Gaston's gastronomical experiments (a chicken-fish soup), and abandoned the intended contract for one about the rights to its recipe.
    • Almost the same thing happened another time, when Gaston had made a funny cuckoo-clock that looked like a space capsule, and had an astronaut instead of a cuckoo. De Mesmaeker found it hilarious, and immediately bought rights to manufacturing them.
  • Another common gag was Gaston being in charge of "ordering" the documentation room... effectively turning it into a literal mountain of books, which people were afraid to get near to, "because of rockfall".
  • Gaston being ordered to deal with the late mail, which he usually avoids by hiding it or, in one case, (accidentally) destroying it.
  • Yet another returning gag was the office being burglarized by Freddy "Fingers". It was always Gaston's antics that got him caught, and he was usually found in such a dismal state the next morning (stuck in a giant cactus, buried under an avalanche of books, etc.) that the other characters took pity on him and sent him home with some cartoons for his kids instead of handing him to the police.
  • Gaston's project of "wax that shines without slipping", progressively more slippery in each iteration until he creates a perfect zero friction material.
• Scale-Model Destruction: Prunelle has an office building model destroyed by Lagaffe.
• Short Distance Phone Call: Entering Gaston's office, Fantasio takes what he thinks is a call from the managers of the company in the next building. In fact the phone is out of order, and he doesn't realize they're actually talking to him through a gaping hole in the wall.
• Sitcom Arch Nemesis: Longtarin
• The Slacker: Gaston is the quintessential slacker.
• Smoking Is Cool: Changed over time. Gaston started out as a casual smoker, which was quite normal for a young European male in the 1950s. But as Franquin wised up to the dangers of smoking, he had Gaston quit and eventually become something of an anti-tobacco activist. He once tampered with the Dupuis company's fire sprinklers so they drenched anyone who lit up indoors.
• Spell My Name with an "S": Is De Mesmaeker or Demesmaeker? Canonically, it's De Mesmaeker (Jidéhem - Jean De Mesmaeker). But since the speech bubbles are always written in all caps, and by hand, the lettering can get a bit crowded.
• Spinoff Babies: Gastoon is a comic published in 2011, about Gaston's young nephew and his elementary-school-aged friends Jeanne, Jules, Bertrand and De Mesmeaker.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Usually the result of Gaston's experiments, especially with chemistry. Of course cartoon physics apply so they are all Non-Fatal Explosions. Non-fatal, but a trip to the hospital is quite frequent.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Prunelle replaced Fantasio as the "mean boss" role. This was because Franquin didn't want Fantasio to be appearing both in the Gaston series and the Spirou series when he stopped writing Spirou.
• Swivel Chair Antics: Various occurrences.
  • On one occasion, Gaston stepped on one to put away a model aircraft's engine, and turned it on by mistake. He turned the chair into a propeller-driven vehicle.
  • He an Jules-de-chez-Smith-en-face held a Chariot Race in swivel chairs once.
• There Are No Therapists: De Mesmaeker really, really needs to see a therapist, and fast, considering how much any hindrance leads him to refuse to sign the contracts and literally turning red with anger. (He probably needs to see a heart surgeon soon enough, in any case.)
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Fantasio and Prunelle sometimes manages to work Gaston.
  • Officer Longtarin managing to give Gaston some pretty spicy parking tickets.
• Too Dumb to Live: Gaston in some comics. For example, once he decides to play at cup and ball with his bowling ball.
• Unusual Chapter Numbers: The album numbers go as follows: R1, R2, R3, R4, 6, 7 and so on. There used to be no fifth album. This is because the original album printing was done in half-sized softcovers, five of them specifically, the sixth being the first hardcover. When the original five were reprinted (the four "R" albums), only three-and-a-half albums' worth of material could be obtained from the softcovers, the fourth album using humorous text filler and character logs to round up to a full album, leaving the fifth album gap and turning this into a Mythology Gag. After a while, a fifth album was compiled from gags that hadn't been published outside the journal yet, or that had been made for advertisement purposes. It was numbered R5.
• Vague Age: Gaston is obviously in his late teens or early twenties, as he has a job, a car, and his own place, but his age is indeterminate beyond that, and he often acts younger. Franquin, the creator of the series, admitted to neither knowing nor wanting to know Gaston's age. He mentioned that Gaston, in his mind, is a teenager.
• Walking Disaster Area: Gaston really doesn't want to harm anyone, but due to his total lack of common sense he causes huge disasters no matter what he does. Even when he IS careful, and DOES demonstrate common sense, he's unlucky - or someone else triggers a disaster.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When Gaston built a model World War II airplane that threw real bombs on Prunelle, as a Take That on said warplanes being depicted in the magazine. Learning nothing from his mistake, he stated that for his next project he was building a tank "with realistic flame thrower."
• Xenophone: The Gaffophone and a number of other instruments of Gaston's own design. Lagaffe even has a band, whose only instruments are akin to the Gaffophone. The results of them playing can be imagined as a terrible disaster.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Fantasio, Prunelle, and De Mesmaeker many times.