The Purple Smurfs (original French title: Les Schtroumpfs noirs, "The Black Smurfs") is the first album of the original French-language Smurfs comic series created by Belgian artist Peyo. It was first published as an album in 1963, but the stories it contained had already been published in Spirou magazine. The main story Les Schtroumpfs noirs was first published in number 1107 (July 2, 1959) as the first "mini-récit" in the magazine. This was a special supplemental page which readers would remove and fold up in order to create a small booklet. Mini-récits were not included when the issues of Spirou were collected in the quarterly hardcover volumes, so this story is absent from volume 72 of Spirou, though the page containing instructions for creating the booklet is there. Apart from the titular one, it contains two other stories: The Flying Smurf (Le Schtroumpf Volant) and The Smurfnapper (Le Voleur de Schtroumpfs). Plots The Purple Smurfs In a little mushroom village live the Smurfs, diminutive blue-skinned humanoid creatures. One day, one of them gets bitten by a Purple fly that turns his skin jet Purple, reduces his vocabulary to the single word "gnap!", and causes him to go angry and berserk. He bounces around and bites other Smurfs on their tail, which turns them into evil Purple Smurfs as well. Soon, almost everyone in the village has become a nasty Purple Smurf, and Papa Smurf, the leader, tries to find a cure and cease the tail-biting epidemic. The cure is found in magnolia pollen, which is gathered in great quantity and loaded in fireplace bellows to be used as impromptu ranged weapons against contaminated Smurfs. The Purple Smurf has to inhale the pollen, which, after a loud and powerful sneeze, causes him to revert to his usual blue-skinned bonhomie. A great battle is fought outside the village, as the Purple, tail-biting horde closes in, threatening to destroy Smurf civilization for good. The first Purple Smurf to have been transformed, meanwhile, recovers some semblance of ingenuity and paints himself blue to avoid being sprayed by the pollen-powered antidote. This allows him to ambush several normal Smurfs and reverse the outcome of the clash. In the end, only Papa Smurf still stands. He rushes to the lab to reload his bellows but is bitten while doing so. As he turns, he lets the large pollen jar fall into the fire, which causes the