by As promised in the previous post, here are some samples from the anniversary issue of the Journal de Spirou:
Spirou News and Comics in English
Spirou News and Comics in English
As promised in the previous post, here are some samples from the anniversary issue of the Journal de Spirou:
If only I understood French… It would have been wonderful if all published short-stories with Spirou were published in an album or magazine in either English or Scandinavian. By the way, Estaban, is that a series in Spirou? You wrote that Spirou only had a cameo there.
Journal de Spirou is an anthology magazine that runs different comics all the time, similar to Scandinavian comic magazines like The Phantom or Nemi. Some of these are gags strips/pages, some are short stories, and some are serialized installments of a longer story (which are usually published as an album later). Usually, these other comics have nothing to do with the Spirou universe, and quite often Spirou won’t appear at all in an issue of Journal de Spirou.
For this special anniversary issue, however, they decided that the whole issue should be about Spirou, that he should appear in every comic. That’s easy to do with all the gag comics, but for the ongoing series set outside of the Spirou universe, the results are a bit odd.
Since Esteban and Beauté are the two continuing stories that are currently running, they had to put in Spirou somehow. Beauté simply drew him into a group of other characters, but Esteban had him randomly pop up (on a mountain glacier) to warn the characters not to go the way they plan, then disappear again. (Since they ignore him completely, I think it’s safe to say that he was simply layered on top of the finished drawings, and will be removed again for the album version.)
As far as I can see, two of the stories in the sample are non-Spirou stories where Spirou simply is represented as a cameo, but the others seem to be pure Spirou-stories. Hopefully these short-stories will be included in later albums, just like the German album “Poträt eines Helden als junger Tor” included a short -story by Bravo. There are actually several short-stories with Spirou that have never been released in the albums (at least not in the Norwegian albums), for instance the short stories by Fournier, but also stories by later artists. And Chalands Spirou has, to my knowledge, not been released in other languages than French.
I believe this index of the magazine is complete up until early 2013. There was a long period between 1993 and 2003, where new material was only produced more or less sporadically, until Dupuis decided to pick up the production on a more full-scale level again.
http://bdoubliees.com/journalspirou/series6/spirou.htm
That list included far more titles than the one on French wikipedia, which seems to be far from complete: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_histoires_de_Spirou_et_Fantasio I just came home from Paris and bought the anniversary edition of Journal de Spirou. French wikipedia has included only the short story by Yoann and Vehlmann (6 pages), but the journal actually includes several short stories, some of them very short in fact. In one of the short stories, by Fabrice Tarrin (4 pages) Spirou and Fantasio are reunited with Marsipulami, who are know, as far as I understand owned by Dupuis (the character was owned by Franquin, who also owned Gaston, but both are know bought by Dupuis). Another story, by Yann and Dany (3 pages) includes semi-erotic pictures of Seccotine. In a story by Frank le Gall (4 pages), Spirou meets Franquin. Morvan and Munuera has a four page story which seems to continue the theme of time travel from Aux sources du Z. There is a very short story (a quarter of a page) by Emile Bravo, the same from Fournier, 4 pages by Fabrice Parme and a one page story by Yann and Schwartz. There are many other stories with various lengths. Some of them are to be considered as comments and painted in a style that makes even Panique en Atlantique by Parme and Trondheim seem like mainstream Spirou.