by A few weeks ago, Spirou Reporter reposted an image that Kid Toussaint had put up on Facebook, a film noir-ish drawing by Chris Evenhuis for an aborted Spirou project they worked on together. Toussaint followed up that post with a series of images from another Spirou project, this time with more of a superhero flavor:
(The reference to the “professor” being 75 suggests that this may have been intended for the Spirou 75th anniversary issue in 2013.) In addition to this sample page, drawn by David Lafuente (Ultimate Spider-Man), the images include studies of many Spirou characters, drawn by several different artists (apparently mostly from the Marvel stable)…
By Lafuente:
By JL Mast and Geoffo Panda:
And finally, a splash page by Paul Renaud:
Re-imagining Spirou as a masked hero flying around with a souped-up jetpack, ‘Spirou Comics’ could be considered a precursor to Yoann & Vehlmann’s Supergroom.
I absolutely adore these, they look amazing and the style is beautiful
That’s supposed to be LUNA!?? She doesn’t look like her at all!
Seccotine is cute though.
I like the Fantasio but the other ones are very, very generic to me. Those women could have been anyone, really. I much prefer their T&J (and for Seccotine Franquin and Y&V) versions, thank you very much.
On a related note, while Spirou Reporter seemed to be enthusiastic about the Supergroom thing, I personally dislike the whole concept greatly. But then, I am simply not into superhero comics at all so I’m hardly a non-biased judge. I like my Franco-Belgian comics to be recognisably so in style and themes. Am I alone in finding the whole concept of Supergroom to be derivative, boring, stupid and somewhat reeking of fear of becoming outdated? I think ‘Dans les griffes de viper’ was an excellent example of the road that Spirou creators ought to be walking to keep the character interesting: make him relevant in the modern age, make him stand up for what’s just at a personal cost, add politically/economically/intellectually powerful but not superpowered enemies and stay away from too much science fiction (admittedly a slippery slope and vague). Superhero Spirou, though? Yuck.
Well, I like to be open-minded, though the superhero concept can’t lure me in, and I love them.
The thing is, Spirou, while performing extraordinary stunts, is just an average guy, going in the superhero direction is just milking the cow.