HISTORY | COMICS
“The blacks, they are coming!”
The Smurfs very first, possible ‘racist’ comic book
In 1959, Peyo created his very first Smurfs comic strip in the Spirou newspaper in the form of a mini-story. Four years later, Les Schtroumpfs Noirs (The Black Smurfs) is published as a standalone album.
Inside, the story tells how the Smurfs are transformed into zombie-like creatures who no longer function as Smurfs. In fact, they’ve become a crazed band of black Smurfs who want nothing more than to bite their fellow Smurfs and turn them black too.
The plot has one Smurf who gets stung by a fly known as the Bzz Fly that turns his skin jet black. This drives him insane and reduces his vocabulary to the single word “gnap!”
Brainy Smurf rushes back to the village to tell Papa Smurf who at once begins to work on a cure for the black disease. He needs a live black Smurf to experiment on but the infected Smurf is roaming wild in the forest.
Although captured, the black Smurf bites his guards who subsequently escape to the forest. One by one, the Smurfs are struck down with infection as they attempt to capture a black in order to change him.
Time is running out for Papa Smurf to find an antidote to the black madness of the Bzz Fly…
