19 March, 2024
Robbedoes Special #2 'Het Plan van Wiebeling' penciled page ("Spirou Special #2: Zantafio's Plan"; ill. Cambré & Legendre; Copyright (c) Dupuis, Ballon Media and the artists; image from stripspeciaalzaak.be)

Zantafio’s Plan

Robbedoes Special #2 'Het Plan van Wiebeling' penciled page ("Spirou Special #2: Zantafio's Plan"; ill. Cambré & Legendre; Copyright (c) Dupuis, Ballon Media and the artists; image from stripspeciaalzaak.be)
Pencil page for ‘Het Plan van Wiebeling’, by Charel Cambré (2017)

According to Stripspeciaalzaak, this December will see another album in the Dutch-language Robbedoes Special series by Charel Cambré and Marc Legendre: Het Plan van Wiebeling (“Zantafio’s Plan”).

The story has a Christmas setting and features Zantafio and Seccotine. Stripspeciaalzaak also provides a blurb:

Fantasio’s cousin, the sneaky Zantafio, accidentally comes into possession of a large batch of diamonds. The police is looking for the precious stones, and some way to smuggle them across the border is needed. Meanwhile, the Count of Champignac has built a device to solve the overfishing of the seas. Seccotine comes along to write an article about the test run. And Spirou and Fantasio? They have rented a vacation cottage by the sea to celebrate Christmas and to work on an end-of-year summary for the magazine. But of course things don’t work out that way.

Like the first album in the series, Happy Family, this one will also be published in a deluxe hardcover edition as well as the regular softcover version.

Update: Dupuis are in the process of updating their website design, and the Dutch version is currently a bit broken, but here is the official page for the album, with slightly more detail in the blurb. (The diamonds are Jewish; Spirou & Fantasio witness the theft but can’t arrest the suspect because there’s no proof, with the jewels have vanished; the Count’s invention is made for a mysterious Mr. Wobbel; and the test is being led by a Captain Buiswater van de Kibbeling.)

Spirou Reporter

I grew up reading Spirou in Scandinavian translations. Now I'm learning French and trying to decode the originals.

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9 thoughts on “Zantafio’s Plan

  1. Oh my god, another one?? Seriously, this is starting to feel like a huge middle finger to readers that don’t speak Dutch haha,I just wished they would translate these albums to french at some point :'( The summary sounds really interesing though!

    1. Apparently ‘Robbedoes speciaal’ is a series, and meant to attract a Flemish and Dutch audience.

      ‘Tulpen uit Istanboel’ by Hanco Kolk (unrelated to ‘Robbedoes speciaal’) will be published in French in October, according to the same source on Stripspeciaalzaak as Spiroureporter linked to.

  2. But “Tulpen uit Istanboel” isn’t considered part of this series?

    I’d assume all these books would be released in French at some point, maybe in their own series. I guess “Robbedoes” could still be used as a marketing term or something.

    They’re probably not any worse than “La grosse tête”, anyway…

    1. No, Hanco Kolk’s album is a proper one-shot, and will come out in French at some point (according to Dupuis’s spokesperson). Robbedoes Special is a new series aimed specifically at the Dutch/Flemish market, with its own continuity and with a more Flemish style (storytelling and illustration-wise) and publishing model: softcover albums and a higher rate of publication, probably two or three albums a year if the series is a success. (Personally I think there’s a whiff of mass-production about Robbedoes Special that I don’t get from Spirou & Fantasio even with all the one-shots and spin-offs.)

      There’s been no indication that there will be a French edition of these Robbedoes Special albums.

    1. Robbedoes, Piet Kwabbernoot, Wiebeling… I don’t think it sounds particularly worse than any of the regular names in the Dutch translation…

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