April 18th - Snorks

A Year in Comics - April 18th

Allstar, Casey and Occy - Snorks

Nicolas 'Nic' Broca was born on April 18th 1932 in Liège, Belgium.  He attended the Academy of Fine Arts, after which he worked a number of different jobs.  Eventually he became an animator, working on the 1965 animated film Pinocchio dans l'Espace (Pinocchio in Space) for the Belvision Studios before returning to advertising.  However, in 1966 he returned to work for Belvision, where he was involved in a number of animated films: the Asterix films Asterix the Gaul (1965) and Asterix and Cleopatra (1968); the Lucky Luke films Lucky Luke/Daisy Town (1971); the Tintin film Tintin and the Lake of Sharks (1972); the Smurf film The Smurfs and the Magic Flute (1975); and the independent film Gulliver (1977); he was also hired by the French Idéfix studio to work on the Asterix film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976) and the Lucky Luke film The Balad of the Daltons (1978).

In the early 1980s, Nic Broca was hired by the publisher Dupuis as an artist for the Spirou et Fantasio series, during a time when a number of artists submitted stories for the series.  Broca worked with writer Raoul Cauvin on three stories, but eventually the pair was dropped in favour of Tome & Janry, who would become the series' authors for the next two decades.

Despite being dropped, Broca chose to remain with Dupuis, and started working for its subsidiary SEPP, La Société d'Edition, de Presse et de Publicité, for which he further worked out the concept of a bunch of characters which he had originally designed for the fourth album on the Spirou et Fantasio series he and Raoul had been working on before they were replaced.  These creatures, originally named the Diskies, became the Snorks, first appearing in 1982 in a comic of their own, before being adapted into an animated series by Hanna-Barbera (108 episodes, running over 4 seasons from 1984 to 1989).  In 1987, Nic Broca created Ovide and the Gang, an animated series of which 65 episodes were made in 1987 and 1988.  In 1990, Broca collaborated on Les Tifous, an animated series based on characters created by André Franquin.  This would be the last animated series on which he worked.

Nicolas Broca passed away aged 60 on February 7th 1993.

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