The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko is a Franco-Belgian comics series created by Hergé, the writer-artist best known for The Adventures of Tintin. The heroes of the series are two young children, brother and sister Jo and Zette Legrand, and their pet chimpanzee Jocko, plus their parents, Mr Legrand, Jo and Zette’s father, aerospace engineer and designer, and Mrs Legrand, Jo and Zette’s mother, housewife and Mr Legrand’s wife.
Jo, Zette and Jocko appear on the rear covers of some The Adventures of Tintin comic books, but never appear in the stories. A few Jo, Zette and Jocko comics allude to characters or events in The Adventures of Tintin, such as the Maharaja of Gopal (briefly mentioned in The Castafiore Emerald) appearing as a prominent character, and a portrait of Captain Haddock in the Legrand house.
Synopsis
The following are the five Jo, Zette and Jocko titles, both in English and French, which are published between 1951 and 1957.
Characters
The Legrand Family
Jo
Jo Legrand is the oldest of the Legrand children. He is the son of Mr and Mrs Legrand.
Zette
Zette Legrand is the youngest of the Legrand children. She is the sister of Jo Legrand and the daughter of Mr and Mrs Legrand.
Jocko
Jocko is Jo and Zette’s pet chimpanzee.
Mr Legrand
Mr Legrand is Jo and Zette’s father. He works for S.A.F.C.A. (a French Aerospace Company) as a designer and aviation engineer.
Mrs Legrand
Mrs Legrand is Jo and Zette’s mother and also Mr Legrand’s wife. She looks after her children at home.
Recurring characters
Werner and Charlie Brooke
Werner Brooke and Charlie Brooke are the two villains in both volumes of The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko: Mr Pump’s Legacy and Destination New York.
Fred and William Stockrise
Fred Stockrise and William Stockrise are Mr Pump’s two nephews. They are also both villains. Alongside Werner and Charlie Brooke, the Stockrise brothers also appear in both volumes of The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko: Mr Pump’s Legacy and Destination New York.
Others
The mad scientist (The Manitoba No Reply & The Eruption of Karamako) Maharajah of Gopal (The Valley of the Cobras)
History
Background
Beginning a series of newspaper supplements in late 1928, Abbé Norbert Wallez founded a supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième (The Little Twentieth), which subsequently appeared in Le XXe Siècle every Thursday. Carrying strong Catholic and fascist messages, many of its passages were explicitly antisemitic. For this new venture, Hergé illustrated L'Extraordinaire Aventure de Flup, Nénesse, Poussette et Cochonnet (The Extraordinary Adventure of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette and Cochonnet), a comic strip authored by one of the paper's sport columnists, which told the story of two boys, one of their little sisters, and her inflatable rubber pig. Hergé was unsatisfied, and eager to write and draw a comic strip of his own. He was fascinated by new techniques in the medium – such as the systematic use of speech bubbles – found in such American comics as George McManus' Bringing up Father, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Rudolph Dirks's Katzenjammer Kids, copies of which had been sent to him from Mexico by the paper's reporter Léon Degrelle, stationed there to report on the Cristero War.
Publication
In late 1935 Hergé was visited by Abbot Courtois and Abbot Pihan, the editors of Cœurs Vaillants ("Valiant Hearts"), a French Catholic newspaper that was publishing The Adventures of Tintin. Courtois was often unhappy with elements of Hergé's work, and had recently complained about a scene in his latest story, The Broken Ear, in which the two antagonists drown and are dragged to Hell by demons. On this occasion, he asked Hergé to create new characters who would be more relateable for their young readership. Whereas Tintin had no parents and did not go to school, they wanted a series in which the protagonists had a family and acted more "normal"; they also requested that these characters have their adventures in France.