Things being published

A small heads up on recent and upcoming Spirou publications.

Last week, Beaux Arts Magazine put out Spirou a 75 ans: Les aventures d’un géant de la BD (“Spirou at 75: The Adventures of a Giant of Comics”), a 128-page book about the series. French-speaking fans have not been enthusiastic, complaining about lack of new information, insight or material (with one exception: a new Turbotraction model by Yoann), and mediocre graphical presentation. Still, at the price (only 8.90 EUR), it might be a good primer for the casual reader.

Egmont announced a Finnish book to be released on 23. October: Piko ja Fantasio: Zorbul-Tarinat (“Spirou & Fantasio: The Story of Zorglub”). While there’s been some confusion on Finnish forums about just what it will contain, with some expecting it to collect Franquin’s three Zorglub albums, this appears simply to be an edition of volume 7 of the intégrale collected edition, with the first two Zorglub albums and the short story La peur a bout du fil (“Fear at the End of the Line”). Egmont previously announced that they would publish this book series in Finnish, so it looks like they’re doing them out of order.

Issue 08/2013 of Comix includes another story from the Journal de Spirou 75th anniversary issue in German, this time Frank Le Gall’s contribution, the four-page Un voyage en papier (“A Trip to Paper”). See samples from the French version here.

Meanwhile, as previously reported, Cinebook is set to release their first Franquin album, Spirou & Fantasio: The Marsupilami Thieves on 30. August, and Spirou sous le manteau (“Spirou Under the Counter”) is still scheduled for 6. September. Other upcoming publications are listed here (French) and here (other languages).