Gaston Lagaffe

Spending Summers in France as a kid, I got to know the Gaston Lagaffe comic strips. They've never been translated into English, but it's still possible to follow along by looking at the pictures.

Gaston works in an office as a paper-pusher, but he has absolutely no interest in that. Instead of working, he constantly engages in pet projects that are very creative, but that completely ignore the requirements of his job, or the safety of others (and himself).

I love Gaston! He's so enthusiastic about his projects, and his projects are all fascinating, over-the-top conceptions that violate cultural conformity.

And yet ultimately, he's a Frenchman. Since I was an American kid in France, it was easy for me to spot his French traits. His taste in clothes and food always seemed very French to me. He's not a rebel per se. He's just very enthusiastic about everything.

His lack of concern for safety most often manifests as putting his coworkers in immediate danger, for example, blowing up part of the building. But that aspect of his personality is also fairly directly assessed as stupidity in the strip. In one single-panel story, we see Gaston at the beach, paddling out to sea on a raft. In the foreground, one of his coworkers holds a camera, saying to another coworker, "I told him I wanted a picture of him at the horizon... and he went!"

I have about six books of Gaston, that I bought long ago on one of my visits. There are 19 in all. They can't be found on http://amazon.com, probably because they've never been translated. But they can be found on http://amazon.fr! So I recently found them and ordered the remaining ones. They're €10 each, plus shipping. So it's not exactly cheap. But I got them, and I can't wait to read them!

It's not the first time I've wanted a book that could only be ordered from Europe. When Ann Hutchinson Guest first published her Advanced Labanotation series of books, I had to go to http://amazon.co.uk to get them. I don't know why Amazon would have different items available in different countries. The UK site is especially odd, since there's no language barrier, either in the site itself or in the products they sell. But now that Google Translate will automatically convert any web page to English for me, there's even less of a reason. I just visited http://amazon.cn, with no problem. Chrome detected the language, and converted it to English almost instantaneously. Sadly, the login credentials are not always the same, from site to site. The Chinese site wanted me to set up a whole new account.

Anyway, Gaston Lagaffe is great. It brings back lots of memories from my childhood. I don't recommend spending the money for the books, unless you can read French. But if you come over for a visit, I'd be happy to show off my collection.