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This week we have the announcement of a new Spirou album in English, an upcoming short story by Yoann & Vehlmann, news on a long-planned one-shot, and more details on soon-to-be released books.
If you’ve received your copy of The Marsupilami Thieves (Spirou #5), you already know that the next two albums will be Tome & Janry’s Spirou in Moscow (Spirou #42) followed by Franquin’s The Rhinoceros’ Horn (Spirou #6). First, it’s great to see that this Franquin album is not going to be a one-off. Second, this suggests that Cinebook intends to work their way through the series alternating between these two eras, but going chronologically within each. No timeframe is indicated for when they will come out.
Le Journal de Spirou leaked the news on Facebook that the magazine will soon feature a story by Yoann & Vehlmann that brings back Radar, a sinister robot from one of Franquin’s early stories. Radar (along with his creator, the mad Doctor Samovar) was seen in Schwartz & Yann’s one-shot Le groom vert-de-gris (“The Field-Gray Bellhop”) in 2009, but otherwise hasn’t appeared in the series for more than sixty years.
Asterix and the Picts, the first album by the team of Didier Conrad and Jean-Yves Ferri (hand-picked by Uderzo to take over the classic series on his retirement), is coming out in a month. It has been known for some time that Conrad and Christophe Arleston, a prolific writer of whose series include Lanfeust of Troy, Trolls of Troy and Ythaq, were supposed to be working on a one-shot known as Mystère de Venise or Aventure à Venise (“Mystery/Adventure in Venice”). In an interview in the October issue of the magazine Casemate (#63), Conrad says that he’s got the script, but is exhausted from the work on Asterix, so he’ll tackle it next year once the promotional phase for Asterix is over. That statement at least makes it sound like it’s one of the first things on his to-do list.
Casemate also features an article (by Jean-Pierre Fuéri) on Yves Chaland’s work on Spirou, anticipating the release of Spirou par Chaland in October. The article includes interesting anecdotes by José-Louis Boucqet, now deputy editorial director at Dupuis and apparently one of the driving forces behind the book, and also provides some samples of what the content of the book will probably look like. The series will apparently be presented in black and white halftone, as originally printed in the magazine (so not in either of the duotone or color versions produced before and after Chaland’s death), while other images will be in color.
If you’d like to see more of the contents, preview samples from this and other upcoming Dupuis publications are available on the publisher’s site: Les Robinsons du rail (“The Railway Robinsons”), Spirou et Fantasio: L’Intégrale 1984–1987 by Tome & Janry, and Spirou par Chaland (click on the covers to launch).
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You write that Doctor Samovar was seen in Le groom vert-de-gris. Where exactly was this?
Samovar is the mad genius who has trained the bats that give the album its German and Danish title. He and Radar can both be seen on p. 46/48 (depending on whether you use Schwartz’s numbering or the album page number).