Gaston Lagaffe: Difference between revisions
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[[File:GastonLagaffe_1121.jpg|frame]]
'''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 [[The Slacker|he never gets any work done]], instead preferring to spend his work days cobbling together mad contraptions, playing music on [[Xenophone|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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{{tropelist}}
* [[The Alleged Car]]: Gaston's car is an old jalopy [[wikipedia:Fiat 509|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.
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* [[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
* [[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]]
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** 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
** His [[Xenophone|Gaffophone]] has this result as well, making animals manically depressed and [[Beyond the Impossible|driving plants to suicide.]]
* [[Bungling Inventor]]: Gaston
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* [[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 ''[[Anthology Comic|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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20191029062329/http://www.objectible.net/forum/showthread.php?
** In German, Prunelle's is translated as "Hrrgttnchml!", which is the vowelless version of "Goddammit!", roughly speaking.
** The
** 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 [[Feathered Fiend|"domesticated" seagull]].
* [[Character Title]]: The French albums of the comic are simply titled ''Gaston''.▼
* [[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 [[Meddlesome Patrolman|Longtarin]].
* [[Cigarette of Anxiety]]: Occurs with a [[Panicky Expectant Father]].
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* [[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
* [[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<ref>''[[Breaking Point]]'' and ''[[
** 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....
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** 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
* [[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
* [[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]]
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* [[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.
{{quote|"[[Evil Laugh|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 [[The Sleepless|kept him up all night hooting; he retaliated by playing guitar all day]].
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* [[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
** 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"
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* [[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.
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* [[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 Robots|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... [[Yank the Dog's Chain|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".
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** Gaston's project of "wax that shines without slipping", progressively ''more'' slippery in each iteration until [[Up to Eleven|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.
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* [[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
* [[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.
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[[Category:Belgian Comics]]
[[Category:Comic Books]]
[[Category:Franco
[[Category:The Fifties]]
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