Marsu Productions
Marsu Productions, or simply Marsu, is a publishing house and licensing and merchandising company located in Monaco, managing Franco-Belgian comics characters and copyright concerns, chiefly from the comics universe of André Franquin. The name Marsu refers to one of Franquin's best known characters the Marsupilami, but the company also handles the character universes of "Gaston Lagaffe", "Le Petit Noël", "Les Monstres", as well as François Walthéry's "Natacha" and "Le P'tit bout d'chique", and "Léonid et Spoutnika" by Yann and Philippe Bercovici among others. Franquin, who had previously worked for the publishing house Dupuis, decided to  leave his company and start his own in 1987. He brought along his own creations "Marsupilami" and "Gaston Lagaffe", and the company soon started launching a series of "Marsupilami" albums continuing publication of the character Franquin had created in 1952, while working on the series "Spirou et Fantasio" for the Franco-Belgian comics magazine "Spirou". Since Spirou and Fantasio weren't Franquin's own creations, the publisher Dupuis retained the rights to the characters. Several of the characters under Marsu management are however closely associated with this series, and "Marsupilami", "Gaston Lagaffe", and "Le Petit Noël" are to varying degrees  spin-off series. The first publication, "La Queue du Marsupilami" in 1987 with art by Batem and stories by Greg, launched its new series, which by 2007 had passed 20 issues. "Natacha" made the switch from Dupuis to Marsu in 1989 with the album "Cauchemirage", and ended serial production in "Spirou". In 1992, Franquin also added worldwide rights of "Gaston Lagaffe" to Marsu, a series he also created for "Spirou". The "Marsupilami" album numbered 0, "Capturez un Marsupilami", the only album featuring Franquin's seminal stories, was published in 2002, some time after Franquin's death in 1997. In 2013 , the publisher was bought up by its competitor Dupuis.