Idées Noires

Idées noires (Dark Thoughts) is a collection of black comedy comic strips by André Franquin and Yvan Delporte. It's one long parade of industrial recklessness, suicides, executions, recklessness, ecological disasters and other accidents and contrast hard with his work on Gaston Lagaffe, The Marsupilami and Spirou and Fantasio.

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"Idées noires" provides examples of:

• The Alcatraz: Three gags feature a man desperately trying to escape from an impossibly-to-escape prison.
• All Crimes Are Equal: one famous gag shows a man being executed because he murdered someone. Afterwards the executioner is executioned for the same crime and his executioner as well, as well as his executioner and his executioner, and... well, you get the point.
• Armies Are Evil: Military officers are by far the most common villains.
• Atomic Hate
• Black Comedy: Literally (everything is drawn in black-and-white) and by figure of speech.
• Body Horror: Child-Bonsaï.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: A convicted is dropped in a labyrinth... Covering an entire planet. And then a panther is added.
  • The same convict stars in a comic about a prison from which it is impossible to escape. It consists entirely of repeats of the same panels.
    • In his final appearance, however, the convict does escape, and the comic actually ends on a hopeful note as he sets off for freedom. In the last panel, he even Breaks The Fourth Wall to Lampshade the fact that for once, there was no brutal or unhappy ending.
• Humans Are Bastards
• Karmic Death
• No Smoking: A smoker is informed about the many awful diseases you can get from smoking and eventually gets so frightened hangs himself, as "yet another person who died from smoking"
• Shout-Out: To Franquin's own Gaston Lagaffe, in a very black comic about a misunderstood genius.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: VERY far on the cynic side.