Dargaud

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Dargaud is a French comic publisher , which was known among other things for the comic magazine Pilote (1959-1989). Dargaud has been part of the Franco-Belgian media group Média-Participations since 1987 , which also includes Dupuis and Le Lombard .

Editions Dargaud

Georges Dargaud founded Éditions Dargaud in 1943 as a sales and printing company. Over time, the company diversified. The publisher has now published over 150 titles, from car magazines to home improvement magazines.

In 1960, George Dargaud bought the comic magazine Pilote , which had been founded a few months earlier by René Goscinny , Jean-Michel Charlier and Albert Uderzo . Under this label, bestsellers such as Asterix , Blueberry and Tanguy & Laverdure were published. Within a short period of time, the high-circulation albums and the sale of license rights became the publisher's mainstay. With the takeover of the comic magazine Charlie Mensuel in 1982 Dargaud became the largest comic publisher in Europe at the time. In 1984 40% of the European comics were by Dargaud, over 1500 titles appeared with a total of over 20 million copies.

In 1987 George Dargaud retired and sold his publishing group to Média-Participations, who tried to align the titles with Catholic-conservative values. Important authors such as Enki Bilal and Philippe Druillet then left the publisher.

Groupe Dargaud

The new owner Média-Participations assigned the comic activities to the Groupe Dargaud, all non-comic titles were assigned to other branches of the media group. In 1992 the Le Lombard publishing house became part of the group, which was also bought in 1986. In addition to the print media, Groupe Dargaud builds on cartoons , merchandising and multimedia. In addition, the group bought several well-known animation studios from 1994 to 2003 and thus obtained the cartoon rights for Tintin , Lucky Luke , Asterix and others.

Groupe Dargaud-Lombard-Dupuis

The acquired Dupuis publishing house has been part of the group since 2004 . With this, some well-known authors returned to the group, whose conservative attitude has loosened due to profitability considerations. Since then, the group has been (again) the largest European comic book publisher and in 2006 contributed 31% of the turnover of the media group Média-Participations.

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