GREEK LOVE IN EUROPEAN COMICS
BY OLIUS BELOMBRE, May 2025

Think comics in connection with Greek love, and chances are you’ve got the world of Japanese manga in mind. But what about other comic strip traditions? Two other grand traditions stand out: the American superhero comic – with Batman and his ward Robin providing a source of Freudian fascination – and the European comic, in which the Franco-Belgian lineage has an outsized role while Spain, Italy and the UK in particular also have respectable comic strip cultures. This article looks at a few adventure titles from the European, and mostly the Franco-Belgian, tradition.^[1]

Alix and Enak: role models

In France and Belgium, the bande dessinée (comic strip), roughly A4 in size and often published in hardcover, is highly visible and is celebrated as the “ninth art”. Bookshops tend to have a respectable comics section, and visitors to Brussels will see murals throughout the city that celebrate Belgium’s comic heroes. While the primary market of Franco-Belgian comics is the francophone one, many titles are also produced in Dutch to serve Flanders and the Netherlands. The one Franco-Belgian comic that indisputably portrays Greek love is Alix, or Les aventures d’Alix, by the Frenchman Jacques Martin (1921-2010). Debuting in the Belgian comics magazine Tintin in 1948, the series follows the peripatetic adventures of Alix, a blond-haired young Gaul of exemplary valour. Being sold into slavery as an orphaned child and adopted by a Roman noble has left him with mixed loyalties towards the Roman Empire. He finds a friend and protector in Julius Caesar, but foes in other powerful Romans. A series revered in France and well-known in several other European countries, Alix has with the exception of two albums not been translated into English (though Stephen Fry is a fan^[2]).

In the second album in the series, Le Sphinx d’or from 1956, Alix is fifteen or sixteen and meets a fellow orphan, the eleven- or twelve-year-old Egyptian boy Enak, who becomes his devoted protégé and constant companion. By having a valiant older boy act as protector of and role model for a less mature, playful and sometimes irresponsible younger boy, the series set an example for boy readers to follow in their own contemporary context of the boarding schools and scout groups many of them attended.^[3] Two or three years elapse in the course of Alix and Enak’s adventures, but Martin did not wish to let them age beyond that.^[4] As the two protagonists got a bit older, a younger boy, the Greek orphan Heraklion, was entrusted to Alix’s care so younger readers could identify once more with a character their own age.^[5]

You were so beautiful to look at

Whenever Alix risks ending up with a female companion, Enak is dismayed and tries to dissuade him from throwing in his lot with her. Fate lends a helping hand to ensure the boys stay exclusively devoted to each other, as more than one potential female love interest conveniently perishes. Martin explained: “Readers have at times remarked that all girls who are in love with Alix end up dying as a result. This observation is accurate in part. But I don’t want Alix to get married or simply to link his life to a woman’s. It would hobble his freedom of movement, and the presence of Enak at his side would become problematic.”^[6] A pederastic love relationship suggests itself,^[7] and the artist remarked: “I agree that those two characters lend themselves to all sorts of interpretations.”^[8] He was explicit in a 1988 interview with French weekly Le Gai Pied, saying the two “form a clear example of the classic erastes-eromenos couple, and even those readers who are not acquainted with the culture of antiquity find much in it that corresponds with their dreams. For my part, the nature of the connection between my heroes only dawned on me long afterwards, as if I had unveiled myself one day!”^[9] Certainly in the early days of the series, an unwritten morals code enforced by comics publishers – and wider society’s mores – meant same-sex eros could only be suggested, not made explicit. Even late in the day, censorship was sometimes exercised. In the 1973 album Le Prince du Nil the pharaoh apologises for inadvertently waking up Enak, saying: “Tu dormais bien paisiblement et tu étais si beau à contempler!” (You were sleeping very peacefully and were so beautiful to look at!) The Dutch translation leaves out the bit about Enak being beautiful to look at.

Martin did thorough research for Alix and other series he set up, and they generally boast historically and geographically accurate visuals. The visual style, especially the sumptuous backdrops, is a feast, though the work does show its age: it lacks the more dynamic and cinematic styles since adopted in comic art, and the speech is often long-winded, stilted or downright droll. This has its nostalgic charm for adult readers but will not speak to new generations of young readers. In the classical Mediterranean world in which the adventures of Alix take place there is plenty of opportunity for the hero, his friend and other characters to sport revealing tunics or loincloths and sometimes to go about naked, with some limb or object always conveniently obscuring the groin area. However, buttocks and even girls’ breasts are shown in the later albums, and there is full-frontal boy nudity in Martin’s full-page drawings in Alix : Scènes de la vie antique (1983) and Avec Alix : L’univers de Jacques Martin (2002). These drawings include scenes of naked boys serving revellers at a Roman banquet and Alix and Enak posing naked as a heroic erastes-eromenos couple. There is a touch of sadomasochism to the series, too: on more than one occasion, Alix gets subjected to punishment such as flogging, and he and Enak are repeatedly sold into slavery. Their clothes, scanty to begin with, have a habit of getting torn.

From Enak to Jeanjean

There are nineteen Alix albums created by Martin on his own, followed by nine co-created albums produced up to his death (all twenty-eight are listed on this website under Fiction and Drama). The series was then continued by other artists, with the Greek-love content dialled back, the gore dialled up and the visual style modernised. Shortly after Martin’s death the spin-off series Alix Senator was started; here a grey-haired Alix turned senator has a wife and son as well as an adoptive son, the Egyptian Khephren. Martin also produced illustrated guides to the cities of the ancient world, the two volumes on Greece well surpassing Alix in free depiction of the young nude male. Alix albums that contain plot elements suggestive of Greek love include Iorix le grand (1972), in which the eponymous hero mocks Alix for caring about his wounded boy though a girl is in love with him; Le Prince du Nil (1974), in which Enak abandons Alix but is readily forgiven, and the princess who helped bring them back together presumably dies of unrequited love for Alix; Le Fils de Spartacus (1975), in which underwater boys frolic with a Roman dignitary in a Tiberian manner; Le Spectre de Carthage (1977), in which another girl in love with Alix chides him in vain for talking only of Enak; and L’Enfant grec (1980), which features an Athenian gymnasium where men gaze admiringly at the naked adolescent athletes.

Several other series created by Martin also portray age-discrepant male bonds. Lefranc, started in 1954, was initially drawn by him, after which he wrote the stories and others did the artwork. The series is about Guy Lefranc, a French freelance journalist in his twenties who specialises in unravelling criminal intrigues. He is often accompanied on his quests by his friend, a teenage orphan nicknamed Jeanjean. Martin got the latter’s name from a boy living next door whose mother often called him by that name.^[10] According to the artist, the coupling of Lefranc and Jeanjean came about because, in view of the popularity of Alix, the magazine Tintin to which he pitched the new series required it to feature an Alix-and-Enak type pair of friends. He later dropped Jeanjean from the series, explaining in an interview: “How would you have people believe that a young boy follows a journalist of twenty-five all the time? People could impute questionable intentions to me! The problem was that I never showed him in school. Parents wrote to me to complain about it, so I had him disappear without explanation. Whereas Enak is understandable in Roman times, Jeanjean was an unacceptable character for my readers’ parents.”^[11] Journalists too had asked Martin “insidious questions about this household of young males”.^[12]

No girlfriends

It should be kept in mind that a key factor contributing to the centrality of close male friendships (whether or not intergenerational) in adventure-centred bandes dessinées was that for much of their twentieth-century history they were drawn by men for boys. Girls’ and women’s place in this world, whether as characters or as comic artists and writers, was problematic. Into the late nineteen-sixties, the heroes in comics generally steered clear of overt romantic situations, and female characters tended to be relegated to secondary or tertiary roles. Before the liberalisation in the wake of “May 68”, the French social revolution sparked in 1968 by student protests, it would have been hard to depict a married Lefranc, let alone one cohabiting with a girlfriend.^[13] By the same token, emotionally invested male friendships in early comics should not automatically be suspected of being coded portrayals of sexual relationships. What with the scarcity in early comics of important female characters and overt romantic plots – which, given the guidelines laid down by the comics industry for much of the twentieth century, was not necessarily the writer’s or artist’s choice – the stories revolve around friendship, loyalty, discord and rivalry between boys, men, or sometimes men and boys.

The focus on action, adventure, gallant derring-do, self-sacrifice and intense male camaraderie predated the advent of comics and had long been typical of rousing stories for boys in the wider West. This was only natural: comprehensive social revolutions have since taken place, but previously, non-romantic serious friendship between the genders was rarer than it is today and your average boy professed the truism that girls are “boring”. But if explicit same-sex romance could not be shown either, the least that could be said for the passionate camaraderie in males-only environments that used to be depicted in fiction for boys is that in real life this often naturally developed into, or sprang from, Greek love – for example in the shape of “special friendships” that flourished in boarding schools for generations before fear of being stigmatised as gay put paid to the tradition.

Whether Martin cited pressure on him to give a protagonist a boy protégé or instead to get rid of such a protégé, the phenomenon is persistent in his work. The series Orion, in which a young soldier by that name fights for Athens under Pericles, exudes the same reverence for the beauty of young males as is found in Alix. On the last page of the debut album, Le lac sacré (1990), a mostly naked, fifteen-year-old Alcibiades is seen relaxing with Socrates under a tree beyond the walls of Athens. That same year, the cover of Le secret des templiers in the series Jhen (drawn by Jean Pleyers from a scenario by Martin) showed the hero – the mediaeval artist Jhen Roque – alongside a bare-legged boy wearing only boots and the shortest possible garment that can still be called a tunic. In the album the two are seen swimming naked. In his eponymous series, Jhen becomes friends with French army leader Gilles de Rais, whose darker instincts he tries to keep in check. Martin was fascinated by the historical Gilles de Rais, a hero in the Hundred Years’ War who ended up convicted of and executed for sexually brutalising and murdering at least 140 children, mostly boys. (Later commentators have debated whether this was mass hysteria or whether de Rais really committed these crimes, with the balance of opinion currently favouring the latter.)

Orphans all

A series created even before Alix is Corentin by a friend of Martin’s, the Belgian artist Paul Cuvelier (1923-1978). Debuting in Tintin magazine in 1946, this series has the same unmistakable boy-appreciative atmosphere as does Martin’s work. Though broadly drawn in a realist style, Corentin is more cartoonish than Alix and the plots are less intricate, making the series seem intended for somewhat younger readers. Corentin Feldoë is an eighteenth-century Breton orphan of about fourteen who runs off to sea. Readers will have noticed by now how common it was for comic heroes to be orphans, which was a useful device to enable them to go off on adventures without being held back by parents or restrained in conventional domestic settings. Shipwrecked on a tropical shore, Corentin befriends a gorilla, a tiger and an Indian boy also aged about fourteen named Kim. The two are not typically hampered by many clothes: right at the start of Le prince des sables (1970) they strip down to their loincloths for a swim, remaining in loincloth for much of the adventure that follows. Martin once wrote the scenario for a Corentin album at his friend’s request – it ended up becoming an Alix album – and later recalled that Cuvelier “wanted a story in which the décors were reduced to a minimum and the characters were almost naked.”^[14]

Many of Corentin’s adventures are set in India, the Arab world or a fantasy setting that mixes Asian and African elements. The series is rich in tropes such as native tribes always keen either to make a ritual sacrifice of a stranger straying into their territory or to elevate such a stranger to the status of godhood. Corentin and Kim meet both good-natured men who help them (e.g. by letting them rest in beds in their houses) and evil men with a penchant for abducting them and trying to sell them as slaves, where blond Corentin’s conspicuous European physique is explicitly touted as making him attractive and valuable. The boy also gets physically aggressed against, which sometimes recalls sadomasochistic scenes in Martin’s work. And just like Alix, he is sometimes claimed by a female admirer whom he turns down because he prefers to stay with his boy companion.

An ode to friendship

Veering into the realm of the speculative, one could be forgiven for perceiving instances of Greek love in the best-known Franco-Belgian comic of all time alongside Asterix, and one of the few to have become famous in the English-speaking world: Les Aventures de Tintin by the Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi, 1907-1983). At first glance, the teenage reporter Tintin – who, with his egg for a head and two dots for eyes, was not designed to look attractive – seems a rather sexless youth of indeterminate age whose adventures never stray into the realm of the romantic. In Tintin au Tibet (Tintin in Tibet, 1960), Hergé’s own favourite album and qualified by him as an “ode to friendship”^[15], Tintin goes in search of a younger Chinese friend, Chang Chong-Chen, who is reported to have died in a plane crash in the Himalayas. The theme of friendship gets a thoughtful philosophical treatment, and Tintin’s touching loyalty to Chang gets foregrounded to a remarkable extent. In spite of not having known each other long, they form a deep bond and shed tears on separating and on being reunited.

Chang had made an initial appearance in the much earlier album Le Lotus bleu (The Blue Lotus, 1936), in which he is an orphan whom Tintin saves from drowning. The character of Chang was inspired by the Chinese sculptor Zhang Chongren, who was introduced to Hergé when both were twenty-seven as Hergé was doing research for a Tintin album to be set in China. There is similar affection between Tintin and the Peruvian Quechua boy Zorrino, who is about thirteen, in Le Temple du Soleil (Prisoners of the Sun, 1949). Tintin rescues him from Spanish bullies, earning his passionate gratitude, so that Zorrino risks his life to help Tintin. In addition to these friendships where Tintin is the elder friend, from the album Le Crabe aux pinces d’or (The Crab with the Golden Claws, 1941) onwards Tintin’s best friend and travelling companion is the crusty middle-aged bachelor captain Haddock. The boy reporter and his inseparable little fox terrier Snowy eventually move into the captain’s country home.

These and other facets of the lad’s lifestyle have prompted such commentators as the British writer Matthew Parris – whether tongue-in-cheekly or more seriously – to claim Tintin as “gay”.^[16] While it would be pure speculation to suggest there is a sexual element to any of Tintin’s friendships, it is fair to say that Hergé depicted well the sort of emotionally intense, age-differentiated male friendship that has sometimes been the cause or result of Greek love. The Tintin albums were created before the Anglo-Saxon-led escalation of the hysteria surrounding such love, and the known details of Hergé’s close friendship with the French writer Gabriel Matzneff, whose love affairs with pubescent boys and girls were public knowledge as early as 1974, leave no doubt that Hergé would not have been condemnatory of man-boy bondings having a sexual component when they did.^[17]

A leather necklace, boots and a wavy loincloth

There are other comic strips in which Greek love isn’t a theme but where the beauty of a boy, or of boys, is on strikingly prominent display even when taking into account that comics for boys often featured appealing boy heroes as a matter of course. These include the French series Capitaine Apache by writer Roger Lécureux (1925-1999) and artist Norma (Norbert Morandière, 1946-2021). The hero of this series, which ran from 1975 to 1986, is Okada O’Wilburt, a teenage boy born of an Irish father and an American Indian mother. Living in the time of the Wild West, Okada and his dad take on evils ranging from cruel and treacherous US Army officers to equally cruel and treacherous bands of marauding Indians. In the process, Okada faces scorn for being a Métis. A handsome boy with sleek, long, dark hair, he often wears no more than a leather necklace, boots and a wavy loincloth that makes his firm haunches stand out. He is destined one day as Capitaine Apache to lead the resistance against the conquest of the West. The series is notable for being a Western comic that gives the American Indian perspective and for working historical events (such as the abduction by Comanches of Cynthia Ann Parker, whose son Quanah befriends Okada) into its fictional stories, with didactic captions providing background information about these events.

La Patrouille des Castors (“The Beaver Patrol”) is a classic Belgian series that ran from 1954 to 1994 and follows the exploits of a patrol of boy scouts. In the course of the series, which was conceived and drawn by Mitacq (Michel Tacq, 1927-1994) and written by Jean-Michel Charlier (1924-1989), the group of friends Poulain, Chat, Faucon, Tapir and Mouche, who have adventures around the world, are aged thirteen to seventeen. The boys’ bare legs and overall gracile appearance is an arrestingly eye-catching aspect of the series, and the boy-exclusive scouting setting recalls the artwork of French illustrator and scouting enthusiast Pierre Joubert (1910-2002). The latter, best known for his cover art for the series of adventure books for boys Signe de Piste (1937-2024), made boys’ seductive beauty the trademark ingredient of his work. A young Mitacq spent three weeks with Joubert to learn from the master^[18] and modelled the character Mouche on Joubert’s son Michel.^[19]

If Jacques Martin’s Lefranc features an adult protagonist with a teenage sidesick, it’s the other way around in Sandy et Hoppy (or also just Sandy), a comic drawn from 1959 to 1974 by the Belgian artist Willy Lambil (b. 1936). Teenager Sandy Reynolds goes on adventures in the Australian vastness with two companions: his pet kangaroo Hoppy – a boy-roo pairing well predating Sonny and Skippy – and the Englishman Mike Forster, a documentary film maker. The latter’s addition to the series provided the boy with a mate who could credibly foot the bills, do the driving or flying, and come gallantly to the rescue now and then. While Sandy and Mike are happy to sleep in directly adjoining beds in a single hotel room, the pertinent point is less the nature of their friendship than the fact that the period in which the series appeared was auspicious for the sympathetic portrayal of man-boy bonds like this.

In the series Éric Castel, drawn from 1979 to 1992 by the French artist Raymond Reding (1920-1999), star footballer Éric Castel is signed by FC Barcelona. He befriends a group of Spanish boys who are mega-fans of his. The troupe’s leader, blond Pablito, spends his waking hours worried stiff that his famous friend – who drives him around in his sports car and whose hand frequently rests on the boy’s shoulder – will be snapped up by a foreign club. At one point, Pablito begs Eric to allow him to move in. An article by CNN about the comic observed: “Reding’s portrayal of the relationship between Castel and Pablito Varela and his friends, the ‘Pablitos’, allowed every young child to imagine what it would be like to befriend a soccer superstar. ‘Reding did well in creating a strong relationship between Castel and the “Pablitos” despite their age differences,’ says Jouanneaux, who is a FIFA agent.”^[20]

A special mention must go to the French series Tendre Banlieue, written and drawn by Tito (Tiburcio de la Llave, b. 1957) from 1982 to 2010. Each album is a realistically drawn standalone story with different teenage protagonists – boys as well as girls – that highlights an aspect of working-class life in the Parisian suburbs. While the stories revolve around such problems as racial prejudice, substance misuse, functional illiteracy or parents’ joblessness, the title of this comic strip is aptly chosen as the stories are always given a tender touch. There is a persistent focus on the protagonists pulling together to overcome the challenges they face. Each character is given so much individuality, in terms of personality as well as looks, that you risk developing a crush on the odd one. I mention this series for the uplifting effect its ethics and aesthetics can have on the reader, not to imply anything about its creator.

No sisters

Billy’s Boots was a British comic popular in several European countries about Billy Dane, a football-obsessed (soccer, that is) boy some thirteen years of age who lives with his gran; the absence of his parents is never explained. His football skills don’t amount to much, but he becomes a stellar scorer on playing in a pair of boots that decades earlier belonged to famed striker Dead-Shot Keen, whose biography he is forever reading. Of course, good-natured but scatterbrained Billy misplaces these magic boots a few times in every story. Based on a humorous forerunner by the same title, the series was created in 1970 by writer Fred Baker (19??-2008) and artist John Gillatt (1929-2016), with Mike Western (1925-2008) later taking over the artwork. I do not cite this title to suggest that any of the creators of Billy’s Boots was driven by boy adoration, but rather as an example as one of those comics for boys in which girls are completely absent: they do not so much as figure as sisters or background fodder.

Billy’s sports-saturated, boys-only world, in which the lads are in and out of changing rooms, harks back to the tradition of adventure tales for and about boys that were featured in such story papers as the UK’s The Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967). In these tales, boys lived for chums who inspired them to excellence and chivalry, often on the playing field, whereas the opposite sex was practically invisible. This could be seen as a wholesomely chaste approach to boys’ education, but at the same time it allowed such boyloving authors as E. E. Bradford (1860-1944) to wax lyrical about passionate, frequently age-differentiated friendships between boys. And this is how such friendships should be understood in adventure comics, particularly European ones which unlike their American counterparts were more about real life (if unusually adventure-packed) and less about heroes and villains with superhuman powers. It was a genre redolent of the ingredients that have in history provided fertile ground for the adoration of boys, for boys’ hero worship of older boys and men other than just their dads, and for the emergence of Greek love.

^[1] Helpful input was provided by Edmund Marlowe. Readers are encouraged to contribute their knowledge and insights and to draw our attention to series not mentioned here.

^[2] Thierry Groensteen, Alain De Kuyssche, Jacques Martin (2002), Avec Alix : L’univers de Jacques Martin, Tournai: Casterman, pp. 252-3.

^[3] argoul (21 January 2011), “Alix orphelin du 21 janvier”, https://argoul.com/2011/01/21/alix-orphelin/

^[4] Groensteen et al., op cit, p. 104.

^[5] argoul, op cit.

^[6] Groensteen et al., op cit, p. 135.

^[7] The blogger Jean-Yves Alt sees Alix and Enak as an erastes-eromenos couple who love giving themselves over to Roman pastimes such as going to the thermal baths and who resemble a “modern couple from the Marais [Paris’s gaybourhood] on holiday at Club Med” – “Alix, une série culte de Jacques Martin”, 11 June 2008, https://culture-et-debats.over-blog.com/article-20353917.html

^[8] Têtu No 141, February 2009, as cited at http://www.auracan.com/Indiscretions/227-alix-et-les-gays.html

^[9] As quoted in Caspar Wintermans (30 May 2010), “Comics – Maltreated, but Forever Young (2)”, https://www.gay-news.com/article/2863/Comics---Maltreated--but-Forever-Young--2-/

^[10] Groensteen et al., op cit, p. 160.

^[11] Auracan.com (2003), “Interview: Jacques Martin”, http://www.auracan.com/Interviews/Martin/Martin1.html . Martin explains the same in Groensteen et al., op cit, p. 160.

^[12] Groensteen et al., op cit, p. 160.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Ibid., p. 143.

^[15] Numa Sadoul (1983), “Tintin et moi. Entretiens avec Hergé”, Tournai: Casterman, pp. 57-9.

^[16] See Matthew Parris’s The Times columns “Of course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy” (7 January 2009) and “Tintin, Chang and the great gay cover-up” (3 February 2016).

^[17] Matzneff had admired Hergé since boyhood. Hergé first contacted him in November 1964, after Matzneff published an admiring article about Tintin, and this led to a lifelong friendship. See the article “Entre Hergé et Matzneff, une amitié improbable” by Jérôme Dupuis in L’Express, 16 February 2020.
     Matzneff’s sexual adoration of pubescent boys and girls became public knowledge in 1974 with the publication of his Les moins de seize ans (The Under-Sixteens). In his journal A Gallop from Hell (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1985) Matzneff mentioned two dinners long after this, in 1977-8, with Hergé and the much younger Fanny Vlamynck, “the most exquisite couple I know” (p. 21), at the second of which, Matzneff joyfully introduced them to one of his girl loves (p. 272). In the same journal, he described Hergé as “one of the only two elders with whom I can speak, with whom I really want to speak” (p. 252). Fanny had become Hergé’s mistress in 1956 and his second wife in 1972.
     In October 1982, Matzneff was accused of sex with intellectually disabled boys in the huge “Coral” scandal. Though the accusation was false (and finally found legally defamatory) as well as absurdly unlikely as regards one of his particular mindset, it led to police interrogation, massive publicity about his sexuality, the permanent loss of his long-standing column with Le Monde and widespread vilification in the press (Matzneff’s journal Les Soleils révolus: 1979-1982, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001). Hence, in the extremely unlikely event that Hergé had not already known of Matzneff’s love of boys from Matzneff’s confidences in him, he would have from this point.
     Matzneff was devastated by the death of Hergé, whom he described as “a spiritual father” he loved more than his real father. “He loved you so much,” Fanny told him when they spoke that day. She had been trying to telephone Matzneff from the day Hergé fell into a coma, and imagined his being away was due to his being “in the Philippines” (Matzneff’s journal Mes amours décomposés: 1983-1984, pp. 50-1 & 60). The Philippines was then known as the single country in the world where it was easiest for visiting foreigners to find willing local boys for sexual liaisons.
     However, the strongest evidence that Hergé would have approved, under the right conditions, of a sexually-realised love affair between a man and a pubescent comes from Fanny’s reaction in June 1986 to being told that he was happily embarked on such an affair with a girl of fourteen: “I told Fanny about Vanessa, and she looked very happy. ‘It was Georges who sent her to you,’ she said with her luminous smile.” (Matzneff’s journal La Prunelle de mes yeux: 1986-1987, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1993, p. 91).

^[18] Gilles Ratier (18 April 2011), “MiTacq “Hors Patrouille”!”, https://www.bdzoom.com/8125/patrimoine/le-coin-du-patrimoine-bd-mitacq-hors-patrouille/

^[19] Jean-Michel Charlier and Mitacq (1989), Tout Mitacq : Les castors : Face aux ombres mystérieuses, Marcinelle: Dupuis.

^[20] Tom McGowan (30 September 2014), “Meet football’s answer to Tintin: Barcelona and PSG’s comic hero”, https://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/09/sport/football/barcelona-psg-eric-castel-football