by 
The World Cup is over, and so it’s time to wrap up Go Champignac! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) by Nic Broca and Alain de Kuyssche.
[Not a valid template]Let’s give the final word to Yann & Conrad, who created this Top of the Page gag in response to the original publication of this story (which ran in a 1981 special issue):
A bit delayed again; the cleaning and editing of these scans took a while.
And for the last time, let me vent about how little sense this story makes. The game turns out to be pretty much irrelevant, since Team Champignac go ahead and blackmail the villain instead, using evidence that I suppose Leon and Fantasio must have collected (shame no one had thought of doing any investigating before!). That bit wasn’t considered important enough to show, evidently. Exactly what crimes they’ve uncovered that would send him to jail is not described, but our heroes are completely comfortable letting him off the hook.
Back to the football: The referee is the mayor of Razeforest Bricksbury (no obvious conflict of interest there!) or someone who looks confusingly like him. Although he was introduced in Part 2 as an advocate of honest sportsmanship (and a likely candidate for being the sender of the anonymous note, never actually identified), here he’s totally and furiously biased.
In response to all the cheating, which the Count apparently takes as a personal insult for some reason, Team Champignac decide to fight back by… doping. Hooray for fair play! The Count’s little stimulant seems like a variation of his X1 formula, delivered by the blow-dart cigarette holder he used in [i]Z comme Zorglub[/i]. Was this what he went off to develop in Part 2? Can’t have been that much work, since he had the components around already.
Meanwhile, if we think back to the sabotage in Part 2, we’ll see that it makes absolutely zero sense in retrospect: Trying to injure or kill Spirou, who was never supposed to play in the first place? Getting the team drunk, something like a week before the game? What was the [i]point[/i] of that (other than to fill pages in a badly-thought-through story)?
Let it also be pointed out that although the game is broadcast on television, the inhabitants of Champignac (who apparently live in a time bubble, even for a story from 1981) choose to listen to it on the radio instead.
Finally, page 24 (in the locker room) in particular is probably the worst art ever seen in a Spirou story. That top-right panel of the Count haunts me with its terribleness.
One good thing to take away from all this: No future scanlation is ever likely to be worse than this.
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Oh dear, this was bad.
It really reads like something written in one sitting, the story wanders around a bit and then just stops, the pacing and art is horrible, nothing makes sense…
Thanks for scanlating it though, reading this is just making me appareciate the good comics (or even just okay ones) more.
Also it’s flaws make it a pretty good example on how not to write a comic, I think.
Oh well, this story made a bigger dive than the Razeforest Bricksbury forwards…
Rereading the story, all the soccer violence made me think of the old game Nintendo World Cup… (Of course, this story was made about a decade earlier…)
I don’t know that one…
Given recent developments, I wonder if I should have peppered Donald Dump’s dialog with more Trumpisms. He’s not originally a Trump parody, of course – in the original he’s Monsieur Degling (which suggests [i]déglingué[/i]: “falling to pieces, wrecked”) – but the name first appears on a sign saying “[i]Don de Degling[/i]” (“Donated by Degling”), and “Don” gave me the idea. As a blowhard property developer/slum lord with political ambitions, the parallel was too good to pass up. And since Trump was already a public person at the time this comic was made, it’s not even anachronistic!