May 17th - Tif et Tondu

A Year in Comics - May 17th

Tiff & Tondu

Fernand Dineur was born on May 17th 1904 in Anderlecht, Belgium. Prior to becoming a comicartist, he held many jobs - by which I mean, many jobs.  Among the many jobs he held, he was a butcher, a police officer, a colonial civil servant (in the Belgian colony of Congo)... all before he became an illustrator for a number of newspapers and magazines in the late 1930s.  By 1937, he published his first comic, Les Tribulations de Prosper, which became the first comic ever published by the publisher Dupuis.

In 1938, when Dupuis started the publication of its weekly comic magazine Spirou, Fernand Dineur debuted the comic Les Aventures de Tif (The Adventures of Tif) in its first issue on April 21st 1938.  A bald freeloader, he encountered the shipwrecked sea captain Tondu on an island, and soon the comic featured the pair under the title Tif et Tondu.  As a small injoke, Tif, which translates as Hair, was the name of the bald character, while Tondu - shaven - was the name of the bearded one.  The injoke was not understood by all - when the comic was translated into Dutch, the names of the characters were switched, which inevitably resulted in a number of translation issues.

While Tif et Tondu was Dineur's most famous series, it was not his only one: before the War, he also wrote and drew the funny animal comic Les Exploits de Bib, Rip, Fitt et Jop (1939-1940), the detective series Les Enquêtes de Flup, Détective (1938-1946), and Poupotte le Clochard (1940).

The Second World War, German occupation and subsequent publication ban of numerous newspapers and magazines meant, that Dineur was forced to abandon some of his series as those publications still allowed to appear under the German occupation found themselves confronted with paper shortages.  By the time Belgium was once again liberated, Bib, Rip, Fitt et Jop and Poupotte had long since been forgotten; Flup, Détective was abandoned soon afterward.

The post-war years were not kind to Dineur: in 1945, Spirou started appearing again, now featuring an entire new generation of artists, which made Dineur's drawing style look decidedly old-fashioned.  Additionally, Tif & Tondu was treated as a bit of a filler comic, often getting only a strip on the editorial pages, rather than getting pages of its own.When Dineur also started to create new Tif et Tondu stories for a rival magazine, Dupuis not only fired him, but also bought the rights for his series off him.  In his place, the artist Will would continue the series, first using scripts by Dineur, but later working with numerous other writers.

Following his dismissal, Dineur started working for the Héroïc comic magazine, for which he made the comics Ric Détective, Baron Louf, and Les Confidences du détective Nant, as well as writing a number of scripts for others.  Unfortunately, Fernand Dineur passed away on April 1st 1956, aged 51.

While Dineur's successor Will made Tif & Tondu into a memorable success series, its creator Dineur was mostly forgotten, having disappeared from the comic scene before the medium of comic strips started to be fully valued and appreciated by readers and critics alike.

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182nd entry of ?

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