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… And we’re back! To celebrate Jijé’s anniversary, I wanted to present one of his first Spirou stories, Spirou chez les esquimaux (“Spirou in the Land of the Eskimos”) from 1940–1941. For various reasons (partly all the work of editing Jijé’s elaborate titles) it has been delayed, but here are the first three pages, in any case.
The story picks up as Spirou has just escaped from some American gangsters in their airplane:
(I may have turned the Eskimos into surfer dudebros for my own amusement.) To be cont’d this weekend!
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The first steps of a pioneer.
These backwards question marks are interesting. Jijé really has a thing for them.
You seem to have used the original published pages. That’s nice. This episode wasn’t published in the Scandinavian book of early Spirou, and in the Tout Jijé compilation, it seems it was re-colored (and re-edited?) and looked rather garish.
Yeah, the scans are from the German release in the Spirou & Fantasio Spezial album series. More specifically volume 15, Spirou in Amerika. The Tout Jijé version (which I’ve used as the basis for the titles and stuff like certain sound effects) is another Vittorio Leonardo restoration, presumably because the originals or print sheets weren’t available. No, I don’t care much for that recoloring either: too Photoshop-airbrushy, very 90s. Plus you lose out on special touches like covering the masthead in snow for the Christmas special.
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Jijé is totally amazing.
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