Peyo

Pierre Culliford (; 25 June 1928 – 24 December 1992) was a Belgian comics writer and artist who worked under the pseudonym Peyo. His best-known works are the comic book series The Smurfs and Johan and Peewit, the latter in which the Smurfs first appeared. Biography Culliford was born in 1928 in the Belgian municipality Schaerbeek, and was the son of an English father and a Belgian mother. In 1952, Culliford married Nine Culliford. They have two children. Career Culliford took on the name "Peyo" early in his professional career, based on an English cousin's mispronunciation of Pierrot (a diminutive form of Pierre). After working briefly at the Compagnie Belge d'Actualités (CBA), a small and short-lived Belgian animation studio, Peyo began making comic strips for daily newspapers such as Le Soir shortly after World War II. At the beginning of the 1950s, he brought his character Johan to the magazine Spirou, whom he soon gave a companion, the diminutive Peewit; the strip soon became a staple of the weeklies. Peyo introduced the Smurfs in the Johan and Peewit storyline The Magic Flute in 1958; the characters quickly supplanted Johan and Peewit in popularity and left them behind for their own series.