Raymond Macherot (30 March 1924 – 26 September 2008) was a Belgian cartoonist. Although not nearly as famous as fellow Belgian cartoonists such as Hergé or André Franquin, Macherot's work, both as artist and writer, remains highly regarded among critics and collectors. Biography The Tintin years Raymond Macherot was born in Verviers, Belgium in 1924. He wanted to become a journalist or a painter but, for financial reasons, he became an illustrator and comics artist. Following the end of World War II, Macherot began his career producing a few cartoons in the style of Virgil Partch for the satirical weekly Pan, under the pseudonym "Zara". In 1953, he joined the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Tintin, where he wrote a scenario for Fred Funcken's Le chevalier blanc and made numerous illustrations and magazine covers. In 1954, Macherot created the series Chlorophylle, featuring anthropomorphic animals. Macherot sets his first adventures in the countryside, where Chlorophylle, a dormouse, and his best friend Minimum, try to defeat animal villains often much bigger than themselves, typically led by the megalomaniac rat, Anthracite. With Les croquillards (1957), Macherot placed his characters to the island of Croquefredouille, a fictitious country populated entirely with "civilized" animals, complete with technology, police, government, and so on. The action surrounds the introduction (by Anthracite, of course) of carnivorous animals to the island (the 'croquillards' of the title). The story is darkly comic, with many characters ending up as gourmet meals for the predators. Strangely, Macherot's publisher, Le Lombard, refused to release the Croquefredouille stories in book form until 1980. Alternatively, in 1959, Macherot created Colonel Clifton, a series about a retired MI5 detective. He did three books worth of material, all the while continuing Chlorophylle, before calling it quits and moving to Spirou magazine, run by competitor-publisher Dupuis. Le Lombard retained the rights to Macherot's abandoned series. Chlorophylle was taken up with mild success by successive teams of authors, notably Dupa & Greg, as well as Walli and Bob de Groot. As for Clifton, Turk & De Groot turned the series into a relative hit. The Spirou years Macherot began his stint at Spirou with a new series, Chaminou, featuring a cat secret agent to the King, living in the country Zoolande. However, Chaminou's first story, Chaminou et le Khrompire (1964), was unpopular and Macherot abandoned Chaminou. Closer to Chlorophylle, Sibylline, featured a female mouse and her fiancé Taboum. Many books have