Raymond Macherot

Raymond Macherot died in the night of 25 and 26 September 2008 in his sleep.

Other series created by Macherot for Spirou include Pantoufle (with René Goscinny), Mirliton (with Raoul Cauvin), and as scenarist on Mulligan with Yvan Delporte and Isabelle, with Delporte and André Franquin. In the 1990s, Chaminou was revived, first by the team of Yann Lepennetier and Denis Bodart, and later by Olivier Saive, who completely redrew and augmented Chaminou et le Khrompire under Macherot's supervision, splitting it in two volumes. As for Sibylline, the series has been revived in 2006 by André Taymans for new adventures, also under Macherot's supervision.

Macherot began his stint at Spirou with a new series, Chaminou, featuring a cat secret agent to the King, living in the country Zoolande. However, Chaminou's first story, Chaminou et le Khrompire (1964), was unpopular and Macherot abandoned Chaminou. Closer to Chlorophylle, Sibylline, featured a female mouse and her fiancé Taboum. Many books have been published in this series, which enjoyed some success. From 1972 to 1976, Paul Deliège wrote the scenarios for Sibylline. Macherot ended the series upon his retirement in 1990.

Alternatively, in 1959, Macherot created Colonel Clifton, a series about a retired MI5 detective. He did three books worth of material, all the while continuing Chlorophylle, before calling it quits and moving to Spirou magazine, run by competitor-publisher Dupuis.

With Les croquillards (1957), Macherot placed his characters to the island of Croquefredouille, a fictitious country populated entirely with "civilized" animals, complete with technology, police, government, and so on. The action surrounds the introduction (by Anthracite, of course) of carnivorous animals to the island (the 'croquillards' of the title). The story is darkly comic, with many characters ending up as gourmet meals for the predators. Strangely, Macherot's publisher, Le Lombard, refused to release the Croquefredouille stories in book form until 1980.

In 1954, Macherot created the series Chlorophylle, featuring anthropomorphic animals. Macherot sets his first adventures in the countryside, where Chlorophylle, a dormouse, and his best friend Minimum, try to defeat animal villains often much bigger than themselves, typically led by the megalomaniac rat, Anthracite.

Raymond Macherot (30 March 1924 – 26 September 2008) was a Belgian cartoonist. Although not nearly as famous as fellow Belgian cartoonists such as Hergé or André Franquin, Macherot's work, both as artist and writer, remains highly regarded among critics and collectors.

Raymond Macherot was born in Verviers, Belgium in 1924. He wanted to become a journalist or a painter but, for financial reasons, he became an illustrator and comics artist. Following the end of World War II, Macherot began his career producing a few cartoons in the style of Virgil Partch for the satirical weekly Pan, under the pseudonym "Zara". In 1953, he joined the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Tintin, where he wrote a scenario for Fred Funcken's Le chevalier blanc and made numerous illustrations and magazine covers.