They may not have roamed the world like Tintin, but Quick and Flupke, the incorrigible Brussels street urchins conjured by Hergé in 1930, are getting their moment in the spotlight.
A new exhibition opened on Thursday, author Hergé’s birthday, at Galerie Champaka peels back the pages on these overlooked icons of the ligne claire tradition, offering a rare glimpse of the original drawings that gave life to their slapstick exploits and sly social satire.
Titled Quick and Flupke, The Kids From Brussels, the show assembles original ink boards and long-lost comic pages, some retrieved from deep in the Hergé archives. They reveal the deft draftsmanship that made Hergé a master of visual storytelling, timing and mischief.
Quick, the more impetuous of the two, and Flupke (a Flemish diminutive of Philippe), his loyal partner in chaos, navigate the soot-stained streets of Brussels armed with marbles, slingshots and an inexhaustible capacity to disrupt adult decorum.
Policemen – in particular, Agent 15, who recalls the Thom(p)son twins – pompous civil servants, and hapless motorists are their frequent targets and victims. What emerges is a lovingly rendered portrait of boyhood misrule, drawn with a clarity that remains fresh nearly a century on.
Though often dismissed as Hergé's lesser creation, Quick and Flupke were a technical laboratory. The two-page gag format allowed Hergé to experiment with pacing, layout, and physical humour. They first appeared in 1930, just a few months after Tintin’s creation in the same Le Petit Vingtième comic supplement. But the strips about the trouble-seeking rapscallions were the antithesis of valiant Tintin’s globetrotting adventures.
Quick and Flupke exhibition. Credit: The Brussels Times / Leo Cendrowicz
Quick and Flupke are associated with the Marolles, the working-class neighbourhood in central Brussels (Galerie Champaka, next to the Sablon, is close by), but Hergé also puts them in Ixelles and Etterbeek, where he grew up. Apart from one trip to Scotland, the universe in their 317 strips remains in Brussels. They stand as emblematic figures of a specific Brussels: trams clatter by, newsboys yell headlines, and the comic’s Franco-Flemish language play adds local flavour.
Unlike Tintin, Hergé gave real-life references to the strips, namechecking the Ommegang, Dilbeek, the Saint-Pierre Hospital and designer Emile Vandervelde. The exhibition includes some of his lampooning of the dictators of the day, with the boys dressing up as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
After the Nazi invasion of Belgium in May 1940, Le Petit Vingtième closed, and Hergé all but ended the series. However, he recreated some of their previous exploits, for the Dutch daily newspaper Het Algemeen Nieuws, the new Tintin magazine, and a series of pocket albums.
"There are Tintinologists, but where are the Quickologues or Flupkians?" says archivist and author Dominique Maricq. "Herge let his more fantastical and spontaneous ideas flow into Quick and Flupke. They are the essence of ‘Belgitude’ in a two-page format."
