All weekend I have been showing some early material by the recently murdered French cartoonist Cabu. I am not a particular collector of his work, so these were just some pieces I had in my collection of French comic magazines, mostly his first strip Duduche from Pilote. One of the commentators on the comic journalism site The Nib did a piece on Cabu mentioning two things I didn't know or realize: - that Cabu did a television program where he showed kids how to draw funny cartoons and that Duduche was the first comic strip with an adolescent boy as the main character (and that the cartoonist had learned a lot about girls through that strip). That fits in with my observation that when looking at that period one should remember that there was not yet a youth culture. And it shows that even in this early mainstream strip Cabu was revolutionary.
Still, my samples were not chosen because they were the best out of a huge collection. Fortunately Dutch cartoonist (and Cabu fan) Albo Helm sent me a series of strips Cabu did when he was the editor of the first incarnation of Charlie, when it still was a monthly magazine reprinting (mostly American) comic strips. I considered picking the best or most readable (even in French), but decided to show them all here. As always, Cabu seemed at his best when he was drawing 'bad guys', or in one case here 'bad nuns'.
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