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As this year’s Christmas scanlation, here’s a story from 2006 by Morvan & Munuera (with Yann): Noël sans neige (lit. “Christmas Without Snow”, but here as “Snow for Christmas”). This is actually the first proper Spirou Reporter scanlation from this team, so enjoy!
If the title sounds familiar, it happens to be the same as that of last year’s Christmas story (rendered in our translation as “Green Christmas in Champignac”), by Simon and Jean Léturgie. The story is also pretty similar. I would assume that is just a coincidence.
And I think we’ll take the cover illustration as proof that Spirou took the Count’s advice to heart:
The Count’s “nebulisators” come from Paris-sous-Seine (Spirou & Fantasio #47, “Paris-Under-Seine”), where the villain uses them to flood Paris. And of course, “Christmas” in French is noël, which is why Noel’s friends tease him around Christmastime.
The story originally ran in the Journal de Spirou #3585. These scans are taken from the German album edition of Aux sources du Z (Spirou & Fantasio #50, “The Origins of the Z”), Zu den Ursprüngen des Z from Carlsen, where it’s included as a bonus story.
Also, after having done most of the work, I noticed that this story has previously been scanlated by Miriam (using scans from InediSpirou). Hopefully the cleaner scans makes the duplication worthwhile.
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Even in a short story like this, I can’t help disliking M&M’s style and finding myself pleased their run was so short. I think the high-tech gadgetery and slick look they went for just does not appeal to me and their storylines and humour do not cut it, for me. That’s no indictment of artistic skill: they certainly are very capable but their style doesn’t mesh well with Spirou, in my opinion – too melodramatic, ‘hip’, contrived and chaotic-. I found ‘Paris sous Seine’ a major disappointment when I first read it and a re-read has not altered my opinion in the slightest so being reminded of that title in this short did not help either. In all honesty, there is not that much you can do with a Christmas story so I probably shouldn’t be too harsh on them on that front.
I like the “F is for Fantasio” line, however.
Reading Munuera’s pirate comic Les Campbell, where I’m able to appreciate the art without preconceptions, has made me more positive to his work on Spirou as well, and I think the art here is very attractive, though it still doesn’t feel quite like my idea of Spirou.
Scriptwriting may be the more difficult part, because judging from both Morvan & Munuera, Yoann & Vehlmann, and many of the one-shots, I find that I’m more critical to the scripts than to the art in most cases. Here (and in [i]Paris-sous-Seine[/i]) I find it a problem just how redundant the nebulisators are with both the G.A.G. from [i]Le Prisonnier du Bouddha[/i] (as in the Léturgies’ similar story) and the weather control tech from [i]La Ceinture du grand froid[/i].
I’m not sure how much you can blame them for the humor, which may simply have been lost in translation – unless you mean you’ve read it in the original. There’s some wordplay here that I had a hard time rendering in English. (I like the traffic cop’s fond memory of “cars sliding merrily around”, while Duplumier’s doggerel took ages to write and didn’t come together all that well.)
One thing that bothers me is the couple of instances (at the bottom of page 2 and page 5) where two speech balloons are joined together even though different people are speaking. I find that “ungrammatical” according to the rules of comic book storytelling.
Isn’t the traffic cop Longtarin from the Gaston series (although I guess he technically doesn’t live in Champignac)?…
And Petit Noel is another Franquin creation, having appeared in several short stories over the years…
The nose doesn’t look quite right, and as you say, he doesn’t belong in Champignac.
I can’t find any previous appearance of this character. Franquin created a Champignac traffic cop in the short [i]Marsupilami descend sur la ville[/i] (“Marsupilami Goes Into Town”), and more memorably one for the neighboring village Chanterelles-sous-Bois in [i]Panade à Champignac[/i], but it’s neither of them. Nor any of the numerous different policemen who have appeared as extras from Franquin to Tome & Janry, as far as I can tell.
I don’t recognize the postman either (I would have expected them to use Zénobe from [i]La Repaire de la murène[/i]); the others are all established citizens of Champignac.
Of course this scanlation is worthwhile, it’s always fun to read the same comic translated in better English :p. And not only your scans are better, the font is too.
Thanks Miriam! I try to spend a bit of time picking a font that fits each artist’s style; this one is Zap Raygun V2.0. Munuera’s texting is looser and more expressive than what you can really mimic with a computer font, but I think this gives acceptable results.
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