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Lupien, Arsène. Arsène Lupien was created by the Canadian author Félix Métivier and appeared in Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Arsène Lupien (le Hors-la-Loi, le Justicier) #1-251+ (1946?-1959?).

Arsène Lupien is a Lupin Wanted Man. He is a Québécois version of Arsène Lupin-–as witty, as insouciantly defiant of the law, and as brilliant a thief and master of disguise–but with two differences. He began his career in crime because he is wanted for a crime he did not commit, and is pursued relentlessly by police Inspector Morneau. And Lupien, unlike his French forebear, is primarily devoted to righting wrongs (hence his title, “le Justicier”). Lupien’s stories occasionally verge on the fantastic. He fights zombies, ill-intentioned Lupins, criminals who use trained rats to commit crimes, Yellow Perils (“the Monster of Chinatown”), Evil Surgeons, misogynist serial stranglers, evil priests, and murderous Femmes Fatale (“the Female Demon”).

Lupien appears in stories with titles like “An Outbreak of Rats,” “The Man With Two Faces,” and “The Cave of Skeletons.”

* I'm including Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Arsène Lupien (le Hors-la-Loi, le Justicier) in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of the ideasplosions within them. Les Aventures Extraordinaires was not a full-time Canadian ideasplosion machine the way that the Black Mask (III) pulps and a few other Canadian hero pulps were. Rather, Les Aventures Extraordinaire had only a fair number of fantastic concepts in it--but their presence in what was, after all, a series about a Lupin modeled on Arsene Lupin himself was remarkable. Lupin series, and this applies not just to Canadian pulps but to Lupin pulps and stories around the world, generally stuck to the crime, mystery, and detective genres and featured villains from those genres. Not Les Aventures Extraordinaire, though; it featured things like zombies, trained murderous rats, Yelow Perils, murderous gorillas, Satan-worshipers, and such-like with some frequency. This mixing of genres resulted in Les Aventures Extraordinaires being unlike anything else on the stands in the 1940s and 1950s and the stories within often being unique and particularly entertaining. 

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