breeding ground for new talent and series. Rejuvenation in the 1960s and 1970s In the early 1960s, the main changes were the strong editorial work of Delporte, who kept the magazine vibrant despite the more or less fixed series, with numerous supplements, games, and experimental layouts. The magazine demonstrated the pleasure that had gone in creating it, and maintained a strong reader base despite the growing competition from more adolescent and adult French magazines like Pilote. Some of the main authors (Jijé, Franquin, Will, and Hubinon) temporarily started working for other magazines, with Morris the only major name who definitely left the magazine. Their replacements, like Berck, had trouble filling the void. Around 1959–1960, the first mini-récits (lit. mini-stories) appeared. This was an experiment in which the middle pages of the magazines could be removed, which the reader (armed with a pair of scissors, a stapler and some patience) could fold into a small comics magazine of its own. Several artists were allowed to hone their skills inside these mini-récits before moving on to larger pages, and until the 1970s, more than 500 mini-récits were produced, series that debuted in this format include The Smurfs by Peyo, Bobo by Rosy and Deliège, Flagada by Degotte among many others. Only in the early 1970s a number of new success series and authors appeared . The main contributor for the next decades was Raoul Cauvin, a lithographer who worked as a cameraman for the Dupuis animation studios and wrote stories for series like Musti. He became the main story writer for Dupuis, with major series like Sammy with Berck, Les Tuniques Bleues with Lambil, and later Cédric with Laudec and Agent 212 with Daniel Kox, among many others. Other important new authors were François Walthery with Natacha and Roger Leloup with Yoko Tsuno, together with Isabelle by Will evidence of the new wave of adventurous female-oriented comics of the decade. A commercial failure but artistic success came along in 1977, when Delporte created the more adult supplement Le Trombone Illustré, which appeared inside Spirou for thirty weeks, and showcased new artists like Didier Comès, Enki Bilal, Claire Bretécher, F'murr, Grzegorz Rosinski, and Frédéric Jannin, next to more established authors like René Hausman, Peyo, Roba, Marcel Gotlieb, and Franquin, who started his third major series, Idées Noires. Since 1980 The early 1980s had Spirou and Robbedoes searching for a new, appealing identity, with