This week the strip cartoon Robbedoes (known as Spirou in French) is celebrating its 70th anniversary.

On Tuesday the exhibition "The Weekly Robbedoes, the adventures of a news room" opened in the Strip Cartoon Centre in Brussels.

Robbedoes played an important role in the development of the strip cartoon both in Belgium and the wider world.

The first Dutch language version of Spirou was published by Dupuis in 1938.

Hergé published Tintin in the weekly that also contained numerous translations of American cartoons.

Robbedoes was silenced during the Nazi occupation, but restarted after the war,  attracting a lot of homegrown talent.

Morris drew his first Lucky Luke story in 1946. Later his hero was joined by the Smurfs and Gaston Lagaffe (Guust Flater).

The weekly made the strip cartoon popular across Belgium, but a falling readership led to the closure of the Dutch language version in 2005.

The French version, Spirou, is still going strong and as such is the oldest comic strip weekly in Europe.

The exhibition in the Strip Cartoon Centre in the Zandstraat 20 in central Brussels runs until 8 June.

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