Publications Update: July 2016

A couple of updates on the one-shots by Bravo and Durieux, and Spirou Reporter looks further afield to publications in other languages.

Paging Durieux

As reported last week, Christian Durieux is working on a Spirou one-shot where Spirou and Fantasio are both working as bellhops at one Pacific Palace hotel, and a one-page excerpt is featured in the magazine dBD #105. The page has now been leaked via Stripspeciaalzaak, so here it is (excuse the quality of the scan).

Bravo for Trondheim’s twitter-doodle

Émile Bravo has finished his script of his sequel to Journal d’un ingénu (“Diary of a Naive Young Man”). This report comes from The Unofficial Émile Bravo blog, which notes that on Twitter, comics compatriot Lewis Trondheim (writer of Panique en Atlantic, “Panic in the Atlantic”) posted the following message, accompanied by the image below: “Ten years ago, Émile Bravo came to my place to finish his Spirou album. This week he’s finishing the script for his second album.”

The “script” in this case is thought to mean a fully sketched version of the entire album, as in the page seen here. So while there’s still significant work remaining (no word as of yet on just how long it turned out to be in the end), this is a major milestone.

Zooming ahead to Morvan & Munuera?

Zoom is lining up more volumes in its Danish translation of the intégrale collected edition. According to a Facebook update, vol. 15 (Tome & Janry 1988–1991) will come out towards the end of the year, followed by the remaining two volumes, vol. 12 (Nic & Cauvin 1980–1983) and vol. 16 (Tome & Janry 1992–1999) in 2017. Zoom is also gauging interest in a volume collecting Morvan & Munuera’s stories, which would mean jumping ahead of the original French series, which doesn’t yet cover these creators. (Though there is a Morvan & Munuera volume of a different collected edition.)

World of Spirou

Spirou Reporter‘s masthead says “International Spirou News in English”, and we try to cover Spirou publications anywhere in the world, in any language. In practice that is usually limited to northern or western European publications, but recently a couple of different things inspired us to look a bit further afield. It turns out that Spirou can be found in many other places in the world!

Portuguese (Brazil)

In what is clearly the biggest event in Brazil this year, the publisher SESI-SP Editora has recently started putting out Spirou in Portuguese, with three albums so far. The series is simply called Spirou e Fantasio, and SESI-SP is taking a systematic approach, starting with the first three titles in the French album series: Quatre aventures de Spirou et Fantasio (Spirou & Fantasio #1, “Four Adventures of Spirou and Fantasio”) as 4 aventuras de Spirou e Fantasio, Il y a un sorcier à Champignac (Spirou & Fantasio #2, “There’s a Sorcerer in Champignac) as Um Feiticeiro em Champignac, and Les Chapeaux noirs (Spirou & Fantasio #3, “The Black Hats”) as Os chapéus pretos (e outras 3 aventuras de Spirou e Fantasio!). SESI-SP, which recently made a major push into comics, is making a big bet on Spirou, having licensed the first 12 albums and with plans to release the whole 54-album series within three years!

Portuguese (Portugal)

Spirou & Fantasio actually go back a long way in Portuguese, having been put in print in Portugal by a variety of publishers (see also here) since the start of the 1960s: first as Clarim & Fantásio, then Serafim & Flausino, and finally Spirou e Fantásio. The most recent publisher is Edições Asa, who in 2007 – in collaboration with the Jornal Público newspaper – managed to launch 21 albums in a single year, ranging across the whole history of the series from Franquin to the Yoann & Vehlmann one-shot, Les Géants pétrifiés (“The Petrified Giants”, in Portuguese as Os Gigantes Petrificados). After that they seem to have slowed down a bit. Alerte aux zorkons (Spirou & Fantasio #51, “Zorkons Alert”) by Yoann & Vehlmann came out as A Invasão dos Zorcons in 2010, and Aux sources du Z (Spirou & Fantasio #50, “The Origins of the Z”) by Morvan & Munuera as Nas Origens do Z in 2012, but there don’t seem to have been any since then.

Turkish

Apparently the publisher Tudem put out seven Spirou albums (Spirou ve Fantasio in Turkish) under its Desen imprint between 2010 and 2013, namely the four by Morvan & Munuera and the first three by Yoann & Vehlmann. Unfortunately they seem to have stopped after Dans les griffes de la vipère (Spirou & Fantasio #53, “In the Clutches of the Viper”), Engerek’in Pençesinde in Turkish, but most of the back catalog is currently still available.

Indonesian

The Adventures of Spirou & Fantasio (Petualangan Spirou dan Fantasio) has history in Indonesia. In the nineties, Aya Media Pustaka published some ten of Franquin’s albums and at least one by Fournier (Spirou & Fantasio #21, Du Glucose pour Noémie, or “Glucose for Noémie”, as Anggur Noemie). More recently, Elex Media Komputindo took over the series, and published 29 albums, including much of Franquin (repeating some of the same albums, sometimes with different titles), Tome & Janry, all of Morvan & Munuera, and once again a single Fournier album, this time Tora Torapa (Spirou & Fantasio #23). They seem to have stopped in 2014, and only the last two (both by Franquin) are currently listed on their website, although most of the others are readily available second-hand through online stores. (Le Petit Spirou also appears to be very popular.)

Chinese

Yoann recently visited China, and posted a number of pictures from his trip to Facebook. That included this cover:

Unfortunately Spirou Reporter can’t read Chinese (help would be much appreciated!), but Google Translate claims that it is “Si Pilu and Fang Taijiong Adventures 11” (Sī pí lǔ hé Fāngdàjiǒng lìxiǎn jì 11), “Herzog Ambitions” (Zuǒ gé de yěxīn; “Herzog” is presumably a mistranslation of Zuǒ gé, a phonetic representation of Zorglub), and that the publisher is in Tianjin. So apparently there are at least 11 Sipilu & Fangtaijiong albums out there. Wonder whether Le Prisonnier du Bouddha (Spirou & Fantasio #14, “Prisoner of the Buddha”) or La Frousse aux trousses (Spirou & Fantasio #40, Running Scared) is among them?

Italian

Finally, back in Europe, the Italian RW Edizioni is publishing the intégrale collected edition under its Lineachiara imprint, as Spirou e Fantasio L’Integrale. They’re up to five volumes so far (published between 2013 and 2015), but they’re doing them completely out of order, with four of the Franquin volumes (vols. 3, 7, 1, 2) followed by the first by Tome & Janry (vol. 13). Let’s hope the pause in the rate of publication doesn’t mean it’s abandoned, but that they’ll go back and fill in the gaps.

In Italy, Spirou was originally serialized in the comics magazine Corriere dei Piccoli back in the 1960s, under the title Spirù e Fantasio (or sometimes Spirù & Co.). In the 1990s Alessandro Editore published five albums under the same title (three by Franquin, one each by Fournier and Tome & Janry), and those are still available.

More recently, around 2008–2009, Planeta DeAgostini (whose official Italian site now seems to be closed) put out a mismatched set of books under the title Le avventure di Spirou e Fantasio: three hardcover volumes each collecting three albums, the first six by Fournier, and then the first three by Morvan & Munuera. These were followed by two stray albums: the Morvan & Munuera adventure that had been left out of the first book, Aux sources du Z (Spirou & Fantasio #50, “The Origins of the Z”), which doesn’t seem to have been granted a separate title in Italian, and Bravo’s one-shot Le Journal d’un ingénu (“Diary of a Naive Young Man”), as Il diario di un ingenuo. All these were also released in parallel in Spanish, since the Planeta group is primarily based in Spain.

There are no doubt other countries and languages still missing. If you know of any, please submit the information to the Spirou Reporter Tip Line!