Le Petit Spirou ("Young Spirou") is a popular Belgian comic strip created by Tome and Janry in 1987. The series developed from La jeunesse de Spirou (1987), a Spirou & Fantasio album in which Tome and Janry (at the time the authors of the series) set to imagine Spirou's youth. It was developed into a spin-off series shortly afterwards and the authors have focused on it ever since the controversy created after their final Spirou et Fantasio album, Machine qui rêve (1998). New albums are among the bestselling French-language comics, with 330,000 copies for the latest one. In addition to continuing to develop the character in the spirit of previous Spirou et Fantasio author Franquin, in this series Tome and Janry paid homage to Franquin's manner of animating the gag's signature.

Plot

This series details the antics of the character as an elementary schoolboy. A lot of the gags center around the character's interest in the opposite sex, most notably he and his pals coming up with ways of spying on the girls' showers and dressing room. Other topics concern religion and the contradictions and absurdities of the adult world. It is generally acknowledged that, psychologically speaking, the character in Le Petit Spirou has little in common with the clean-cut adult he will become.

Characters

In La Jeunesse de Spirou, regular characters such as Fantasio, Spip the squirrel and their enemy Zantafio also featured as children. However, when the actual P'tit Spirou series came about it was decided to leave them out and to create new characters, given that, in the original series (started in the 1930s), Spirou had not met them until adulthood.

The children

The adults

Albums

Like the main series, these albums are published by Dupuis.

Translations

Le Petit Spirou has been translated to several languages, including Dutch (De Kleine Robbe, distributed by Dupuis), Croatian (Mali Spirou, distributed by Strip-Agent), Spanish (El Pequeño Spirou, edited by Ediciones Kraken) and Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Polish (Den lille Splint, Den unge Spirou, Lille Sprint, Pikku Piko and Mały Sprytek, published by Egmont), Indonesian (little spirou, distributed by BIP), and Slovenian (Mali Spirou, distributed by Graffit).

Media adaptations

The comic was adapted into an animated TV series in 2012. A live-action movie adaptation was released in the fall of 2017. It is directed by Nicolas Bary and stars Pierre Richard, François Damiens and Natacha Régnier.