by Yoann & Vehlmann took over the official Spirou series in 2008. Their first album, Alerte aux zorkons (Spirou #51, “Zorkons Alert”), came out in 2010. During that time, Yoann had to experiment a bit to adapt his style to the more traditional look readers expected, and in illustrations and short stories running up to the album, you can see it evolving rapidly (much like the zorkons themselves). This unused opening to the album, for example, shows clear differences from the look of the final version.
It was included in the limited edition of Alerte aux zorkons published by Khani Editions. The last image is not from the comic, but a loose ex libris (bookplate print) that came with the book. Because of the size, the pages have been merged from multiple scans, and this may have introduced some artifacts and seams. I’m reelly sörry!
And just for the fun of it, I’d like to point out this detail from the first page:
Edit: Pages 2 and 3 have been updated in order to fix a translation error and to improve the lettering (6/9/2015).
I really like the way Yoann has drawn Spirou in this preview.
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Any idea why this was not included in the album?
Not really, but I can guess.
The reference to the 70th anniversary places it in 2008, right around the time Yoann & Vehlmann were picked as the new Spirou team. So one possibility is that this was a pitch Yoann & Vehlmann created to convince Dupuis to let them take over the series. (They’d been candidates back in 2004, when the job went to Morvan & Munuera.) Notice that page 4 is signed in a way that indicates it’s the end of the episode.
After they signed on and had to expand this idea into a full album, they must have decided to use a different opening that reintroduced Zorglub instead. Even if they had used these scenes, Yoann would probably have had to redraw them to match the style of the final album.
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