On the occasion of “Boule & Bill 60 years of daily happiness”, the Belgian Comic Strip Center (CBBD), Wallonia-Brussels International (WBI) and Dargaud editions, in partnership with the French Institute of Morocco ( IFM), offer you an exhibition of 60 panels.
“There is a door to which the adults have lost the key. Entering the world of children when you’re an adult is over. Except for those who have kept a little corner of their childhood ”(Jean Roba, 1930-2006).
Boule and a red-haired little boy as endearing as he is joyful and mischievous. His dog is called Bill. He is a naughty cocker spaniel, clever and resistant to bathing. Boule’s father is called Pierre and his mother Carine. They make up a petty bourgeois family, in a residential area where neighbors and shopkeepers talk to each other and smile at each other naturally. We will also recognize Caroline, the garden turtle, many neighboring dogs and birds. Like those who wake us up in the morning, recalls IFM.
And to add that beyond a great story of friendship and humor, Boule et Bill, it is a small theater of poetry created by the Brussels designer Jean Roba in the magazine Spirou in 1959. Throughout nearly one thousand five hundred gags and forty beautiful hardback albums, the series has conquered children of three generations thanks to the complicity of a little boy and his dog, to their funny and tender humor.
But she very quickly conquered parents too, seduced by the grace of an author capable of translating into gags the universality of childhood, of the family, of their relations with the world around them, starting with animals. of company. And these themselves seem to have a keen eye on humanity.
Translated into fifteen languages, the adventures of Boule and Bill have been shown in cartoon series for TV on several occasions since 1969 before being brought to the big screen with actor Frank Dubosc in the role of Boule’s father. (2013 and 2017). Since 2003, the creation of the albums has been entrusted by its creator to Laurent Verron. From 2017, a new tandem of authors, Bastide (drawing) and Cazenove (screenplay), followed in the footsteps of the Belgian master.