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This week (Sunday, to be precise) is Spirou’s 75th “birthday,” and the magazine is celebrating with a double (100-page) anniversary issue almost entirely devoted to the character. We get short stories by nearly every living Spirou creator: Yoann & Vehlmann, Tarrin, Le Gall, Morvan & Munuera, a short strip by Bravo, Parme (with Véronique Dreher), Trondheim (with Hugo Piette), and Yann & Schwartz. Even Fournier contributes a short strip. The only ones missing seem to be Tome & Janry and Nic & Cauvin.
In addition there are tributes and pastiches by a bunch of other comic artists – too many to mention them all, but it might be worth highlighting Frank (Frank Pé), since he is working on a One Shot album with Zidrou. In general, the stories are quite short, parodic and “meta.” With the possible exception of the Yoann & Vehlmann story, they’re all firmly non-canon. Some gags work better than others, but few of them would seem to be “must-reads” for any Spirou fan. Still, it’s good fun, and I’ll post a gallery of some notable bits later on.
Would love to see some of this in a language I understand. The Danish seems to be the ones who publish most Spirou, so maybe there is some hope that it will be published in Danish?
By the way, a cool picture. I particularly like the picture of Fantasio!
Dressed as Dodier’s Jerome K. Bloche, another of the magazine’s popular characters. 🙂
Can you name all the costumes and characters on the cover? (Lots of them can be found here.)
To respond to your first comment, I think it’s unlikely they’ll publish the issue as such in Danish, but maybe there’s hope for some of the isolated stories as album extras?
Well, the Lucky Luke costume is easily identifiable. Is it Seccotine wearing the costume? The woman Fantasio is flirting with, I have not read any of it, but I think she is called Natacha. Then there is a bluecoat, representing the series Les tuniques bleues. The character dancing with the smurf woman, first I thought I had seen him in some series, but then I started wondering if it might be Franquin?? Next to them is a person in a Marsupilami costume, and there is also a woman with a Spip costume dancing with Spip himself. The count of Champignac is also there. Those who are refused entrance seems to be an oversized Tintin, Asterix and Mickey Mouse + Batman.
The whole thing is a little confusing because you have actual comic book characters, and then people dressed up as comic book characters. For example, I don’t think that’s meant to be Natacha herself, but some other woman (more typical of Yoann’s way of drawing women) dressed up as her. Apart from Fantasio and Seccotine (yes, that’s her dressed as LL), I don’t recognize any of the characters under the costumes.
I think the guy dancing with “Smurfette” in the foreground is dressed up as Johan, from Peyo’s Johan and Peewit (the series the Smurfs spun off from). Outside with the other characters refused entry you can also see Titeuf, from the comic by Zep that was the flagship series for one of Journal de Spirou‘s main competitors (until it went out of business a few months ago), the magazine Tchô!
In the background you can see Agent 212 (by Cauvin and Knox), Papyrus (by De Gieter), Death from the gravedigger comic Pierre Tombal (by Cauvin and Hardy), and someone dressed as the witch Melusine (by Clarke and Gilson). I don’t know about the rest of them, unless that’s meant to be Yoko Tsuno (by Leloup) next to Count Champignac; the policeman with angel wings might be from Passe moi l’Ciel by Stuf (Stéphane De Becker).
By the way, is the magazine easily available in shops in France? I am visiting Paris next week and this special edition of Spirou magazine definitely seems worth buying, even though I do not speak French.
In my experience, not as available as one might hope. I’m sure you can find it [i]somewhere[/i] in Paris, but I wouldn’t count on it being for sale just anywhere. Try a large newsagent, I guess. Keep in mind that it’s a weekly; the next (much less interesting) issue comes out on Wednesday.
Back from Paris. I stayed in a hotel in Rueil-Malmaison, a surburb west of Paris and found Journal de Spirou here. Actually I was lucky and found the magazine in the first shop I tried. It was actually a quite small shope, but it sold only magazines and newspapers. Maybe I will try to learn some French at a later stage. At the moment I am learning Spanish.