A few years ago, my techie boyfriend and I decided to get ourselves an internet domain name. But what to choose? Some names were already taken, and some didn't sound too good when you put www and .com or .net on them. But we both like comics, and in the Belgian comic Spirou and Fantasio there's a little squirrel... called Spip. In the Norwegian translation there's an extra P in the end, and there you got Spipp. So that's why there's a squirrel on top of this page, it's Spip, Spirou's very sarcastic pet.
Spirou the comic was created in Belgium in 1938 by a French artist called Robert Velter (Rob-Vel). Then Joseph Gillain (Jijé) took over for some years, before Franquin took over in 1947, and continued writing and drawing for 23 years. He worked with people like Morris, who created Lucky Luke, who draws faster than his own shadow. (Another favourite of mine.)
In 1968 Franquin wanted to work more on another favourite comic, "Gaston Lagaffe". I love Gaston, or Viggo as he's called in Norwegian. The cat and sea gull are great as well.
Jean-Claude Fournier took over Spirou, and kept drawing it to 1979, when it was drawn by various artists. In 1983 Tome and Janry (Philippe Vandevelde and Jean-Richard Geurts) took over the comic fully, and created 10 more albums. The last one was published in 1998.
Tome and Janry also created Little Spirou, the story about Spirou as a little boy during the 1950ies. These are hilarious!
Back to Spip. It's a squirrel, and it usually comments situations in the story - from a squirrel's level. Sometimes a hazel nut is a lot more important than saving the world, but that's what squirrels are like. I like the Tome and Janry version the best, like I prefer their or Franquin's late style. (His style changes quite a lot in 23 years, for obvious reasons.)
Spip is also an acronym for système de publication pour l’internet, apparently unrelated to the comic. It's a French publishing system based on php/MySQL. I found it when I was looking for a blog system. (And having sold my soul to Uncle Bill, the PHP/MySQL route wasn't for me.) They have a flying squirrel as a logo, and I'm really not sure if it's a coincidence or a tribute to Spip in Spirou.
A couple of informative links:
Writing this makes me realise 2 things: I should go and buy the Spirou albums that we don't already have sitting on our bookshelf and that I really need to brush up on my French before travelling to Paris in February. I can sort of read French text still, but I have forgotten how to speak the language. It's almost 10 years since I took French classes in high school. On the other hand, if I buy albums with French text while in Paris, I might get a bit of it back. :)