Marsu Productions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marsu Productions, or simply Marsu, is a publishing house and licensing and merchandising company located in Monaco, managing Franco-Belgian comics characters and copyright concerns, chiefly from the comics universe of André Franquin. The name Marsu refers to one of Franquin's best known characters the Marsupilami, but the company also handles the character universes of Gaston Lagaffe, Le Petit Noël, Les Monstres, as well as François Walthéry's Natacha and Le P'tit bout d'chique, and Léonid et Spoutnika by Yann and Philippe Bercovici among others.

Franquin passed the right to the rights of the Marsupilami universe to Marsu in 1987, launching a series of comics albums which continued on work Franquin had begun in 1952,^[1] while creating Spirou et Fantasio for publication in the comics magazine Spirou. Not its original author, the rights to the Spirou et Fantasio universe belong to the publisher Dupuis, but several of the characters under Marsu management are closely associated with this series, Marsupilami, Gaston Lagaffe, and Le Petit Noël are to varying degrees spin-off series.

The first publication, La Queue du Marsupilami in 1987 with art by Batem and stories by Greg, launched its new series, which by 2007 had passed 20 issues. Natacha made the switch from Dupuis to Marsu in 1989 with the album Cauchemirage, and ended serial production in Spirou.^[2] In 1992, Franquin also added worldwide rights of Gaston Lagaffe to Marsu, a series he also created for Spirou.^[1] The Marsupilami album numbered 0, Capturez un Marsupilami, the only to feature Franquin's seminal stories, was published in 2002, some time after Franquin's death in 1997.