It features a cartoonist, César, who has to cope with everyday problems, and Ernestine, his neighbor's daughter, whom he has to look after.

1055 of July 7, 1958, for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, in which César and Ernest participate in a model-building competition.

For a long time, it functioned as a learning class for Spirou's young authors, but by the end of the 1950s, it was mainly British series such as Judd Saxon and Caroline that were published there.

Charles Dupuis wanted the magazine to have its hero, so he asked Maurice Tillieux - who had been drawing Gil Jourdan in Spirou since 1956 - to provide one.

Maurice Tillieux brought out his character César, created three years earlier in Spirou for four short stories, and modified him slightly by replacing young Ernest with his sister Ernestine.

César's rapid success enabled the series to be published in a full-page format from the nineteenth strip on May 5, 1960.

[8] Secondary characters are grafted on around César, inspired to Maurice Tillieux by real people more or less close to him: Ernestine is inspired by his youngest daughter, the agent Petitcarné by one of his neighbors, and the cleaning lady Églantine by a cleaning lady who had worked for him.

This was particularly true of his youngest daughter, who was about to turn eight and no longer uttered the spontaneous lines that inspired Ernestine.

[10] For the occasion, the gags that had appeared in Le Moustique were put in color and published in no particular order, with the deletion of some whose puns were unadaptable in Dutch.

[11] A rebel at heart, he's always repeating: “What's allowed by law must fit on the edge of a postage stamp!”; he's also hot-tempered and kind to the point of being trapped by his goodness.

Despite his fits of anger, he's also a peaceful man who likes to smoke a pipe in his armchair and cook, an art in which he excels and knows.

[1] He could have a quiet life if he didn't have sticky neighbors around him, a housekeeper who makes trouble, and the local police officer who gave him 3,236 tickets in six months.

[3] She doesn't understand the useless complications of the adult world, which leads to some funny, but common-sense remarks.

Maurice Tillieux drew inspiration for Ernestine's reflections from his own youngest daughter, Anne.

[2] The first César et Ernestine album appeared in 1964 in the gag de poche collection published by Dupuis.

Editions Dupuis took advantage of the situation to bring out a first large-format album in 1971, entitled L'école des gags.

[19] The fourth volume, Au fil des mauvais jours, was not released until two years later, in 1974.

[20] Despite these four albums, many of the César et Ernestine gags published in Le Moustique and Spirou remained unpublished.

The following year, 1989, saw the release of volume two, Au fil des (mauvais) jours,[22] with 160 pages and no.

Subsequently, the gags published in Le Moustique were colored and reprinted as “filler” in Spirou and its Dutch-language equivalent Robbedoes.

Due to the difficulty of translating the puns into Dutch, not all the gags in the series were reprinted in Spirou.