The youth title, jewel of the communist press in the years 1970-1980, reappears. Led by ex-sarkozyste Frédéric Lefebvre, this umpteenth resurrection of the clever dog and his acolytes mixes nostalgic fiber and ecological display.
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It doesn’t necessarily look like it, but Pif is a monument. This dog exerts a strange fascination on humans, to the point of inspiring them with a recurring nostalgic frenzy. Its return to newsstands since December 16, under the name of Pif le mag, is never more than the fourth attempt to relaunch since 2004. Born in 1948, in the columns of Humanity, from the imagination of José Cabrero Arnal, a Spanish Republican refugee in France, the character achieved in the 1970s a feat: to create, with Pif gadget founded in 1969, one of the most beautiful successes of the youth press while becoming the mascot of the Communist Party.
After three unsuccessful attempts to reconnect with the heyday of this weekly, the circulation of which sometimes exceeded one million copies, L’Humanité, placed in receivership last year, was ordered by the Paris Commercial Court to replenish its coffers. Jewel in the crown, the operating license of Pif gadget was therefore sold, to everyone’s surprise and for an amount jealously kept secret, to the former “Sarko boy” Frédéric Lefebvre. The former secretary of state in charge of trade and spokesperson for the UMP will have to pay an annual fee and an incentive on sales to L’Humanité. A little embarrassed to entrust the dog’s leash to a class enemy, the body of the PCF published an “interview” with Pif. “You are my family and I love you,” moans the former working class hero.
Late start to war? Not at all. At the JDD, the former deputy, now distant from politics, explains that affording this madeleine that is Pif constitutes “an act that is both regressive and transgressive”. Lefebvre, 57, tells with tremolos in his voice that, the offspring of a right-wing family, he secretly read Pif gadget, the communist comic strip. This made the adventures of Placid and Muzo, Pifou or the Masked Cucumber even more breathtaking, but also of Corto Maltese and Rahan, “sons of savage ages”, fighting the superstitions of Neolithic wizards. “In catechism, they said that one should not read Pif,” recalls Françoise Bosquet, who was editorial secretary in the heroic times of the weekly. “In reality, it was not the famous most important gadget. By introducing full stories and no longer by episode, this magazine revolutionized comics.”
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