Quick & Flupke - Catastrophe (বাংলায়)

On January 23, 1930, just over a year after Tintin's trip to the Soviet Union, two appealing rascals called Quick and Flupke made their first appearance in the pages of 'Le Petit Vingtième'. Their exploits were to continue on an almost weekly basis until 1935, and then with increasing irregularity until 1940: only six strips appeared in 1937, five in 1938, seven in 1939 and one in 1940. Three new episodes, each a page long, appeared on the cover of 'Soir-Jeunesse' during the winter of 1940-41, then Herge finally ceased drawing new cartoon strips of the pair.

While Tintin shoots off on adventures around the world, street urchins Quick and Flupke have a whale of a time creating havoc on the streets of Brussels. The exploits of the two scamps continued, however, to appear in the weekly Tintin magazine for 10 years or so, put into color by Herge's assistants. Half of the stories which had appeared before the war were republished in this way.

Unlike Tintin's adventures, these cartoon strips were not ambitious. There was no chain of development, no carefully sustained suspense, but simple jokes which developed over two pages. Each of these mini-stories occur in a part of Brussels that strongly resembles the Marolles district, and nearly always in the street.

There is a fundamental difference of structures between the two series. In Tinitn and even more in Jo and Zette, chaos is always the result of external factors and the heroes endeavor to put things back in order. However, in Quick and Flupke, they are the troublemakers themselves, trying, it seems, to cause as much as commotion as possible in a world which started off being stable.

Quick and Flupke gave shape to Herge's unruly childish fantasies just as Tintin was an expression of his youthful dreams of being an adventurous reporter.

Translated by: Kuntal

Although Quick and Flupke grew up in the back streets of the Marolles neighbourhood in the heart of Brussels, Hergé's humor is universal to the extent that children all over the world can identify with the two rapscallions. There are many other archetypal children in The Adventures of Tintin: they welcome Tintin and Snowy as the two heroes return from the Soviet Union, they are sad to see Tintin leaving at the end of his Congolese adventures, they help Tintin to discover China, they play marbles in The Seven Crystal Balls, they sell oranges in Prisoners of the Sun and they whinge unbearably if they are the children of a certain Jolyon Wagg. 
Aside from the children of maharajas or emirs, the children created by Hergé's pen are simply locals to their towns and communities, just like he was. They are generally be considered well brought up and good mannered.

In this post I made a humble attempt to translate another "Quick & Flupke" comics, "Catastrophe" in Bengali ("দুর্যোগ-বিপর্যয়"). The sense of the text got priority over its literal counter-part. Hopefully readers will find this classic humor strips quite interesting and funny, and will keep on laughing along with the hilarious adventures of two street urchins, Quick and Flupke, like the way I did.

Catastrophe
(in Bengali)