'Tintin à la Recherche du Veau d'Or' (Tintin parody from Le Canard Enchaîné, 1958).
Jacques Laplaine was a French cartoonist, best-known as Lap, and a longtime collaborator of Le Canard Enchaîné. He was born in Joigny, Yonne in 1921, and published his first drawings in Le Réveil du Peuple in 1941. He was part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation, and also contributed to the illegal paper Combat.
His work appeared in L'Action (1944), La Marseillaise (1945), La Boîte à Sel (1946) and Fantasia (1947) before Laplaine began his collaboration with Le Canard Enchaîné in 1946. He made over 30,000 drawings for this satirical weekly over a course of 40 years, as well as the pantomime comic strip 'Le Petit President' (1951-1952). In 1958 Lap drew a parody of Hergé's 'Tintin' in the magazine, titled 'Tintin à la Recherche du Veau d'Or' (Tintin on the Search for the Golden Calf'), but took the precaution of not imitating Hergé's "ligne claire" ("clear line"), nor Tintin's main cast members. In the story France's national personification Marianne visits Tintin because she is threatened by anonymous letters which read the text "le veau d'or est toujours debout" ("the golden calf is always standing"). Two substitutes for Thompson and Thomson prevent her from entering the quiffed reporter's door, because, according to them, he was arrested for "bringing down the moral of the army". This alluded to the ongoing Algerian War of Independence at the time. Various investigative reporters like Claude Bourdet and Jean-Jacques Servan had published articles which exposed the illegal actions of the French colonial regime in Algeria, including torture by French soldiers. Bourdet and Servan were attacked by military officers for "demoralizing the army". In 1961 Gabriel Macé and Grum (Marcel Magrum) made another satirical 'Tintin' parody in the magazine, 'Les Nouvelles Aventures de Tintin et Michou', for which their other cartoonist André Escaro drew new installments all throughout the 1960s.
Lap also drew the daily strip 'Monsieur Cloche' for Franc-Tireur (1947-1957) and contributed to the regional press. He was a freemason with the Grand Orient de France. He passed away in Jouy on 2 January 1987.
Le Canard Enchaîné (18 January 1967). The man interviewed in the chair is politician (and later president) Georges Pompidou. Translation: "But I blabber, I blabber,... I don't want to exceed my parole."