Antoine Vertignasse 'Vert' - Spirou's best friend and companion in his adventures.Spirou - The main character, already wearing his trademark red bellhop outfit.

However, when the actual P'tit Spirou series came about it was decided to leave them out and to create new characters, given that, in the original series (started in the 1930s), Spirou had not met them until adulthood. In La Jeunesse de Spirou, regular characters such as Fantasio, Spip the squirrel and their enemy Zantafio also featured as children. It is generally acknowledged that, psychologically speaking, the character in Le Petit Spirou has little in common with the clean-cut adult he will become. Other topics concern religion and the contradictions and absurdities of the adult world. A lot of the gags center around the character's interest in the opposite sex, most notably he and his pals coming up with ways of spying on the girls' showers and dressing room. This series details the antics of the character as an elementary schoolboy. In addition to continuing to develop the character in the spirit of previous Spirou et Fantasio author Franquin, in this series Tome and Janry paid homage to Franquin's manner of animating the gag's signature. New albums are among the bestselling French-language comics, with 330,000 copies for the latest one. It was developed into a spin-off series shortly afterwards and the authors have focused on it ever since the controversy created after their final Spirou et Fantasio album, Machine qui rêve (1998). The series developed from La jeunesse de Spirou (1987), a Spirou & Fantasio album in which Tome and Janry (at the time the authors of the series) set to imagine Spirou's youth. Le Petit Spirou (Dutch: De Kleine Robbe 'Young Spirou') is a popular Belgian comic strip created by Tome and Janry in 1987. The Spirou et Fantasio album La jeunesse de Spirou from 1987 became the launching pad for the spin-off series Le Petit Spirou.