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Catching up on some older news, it was revealed in December that the upcoming album by Munuera, La Fille de Zorglub (“Zorglub’s Daughter”), won’t be a Spirou one-shot, but actually the first volume in a Zorglub spin-off series. Also, the title is now the slightly different La Fille du Z (“Daughter of the Z”).
The spin-off is described as a “thoroughly modern adventure in an energetic style” that explores the universe of Spirou’s famous “super-villain” in his daily life as an overwhelmed father as well as a dreaded inventor. To look for the roots of this idea, we might remember that Morvan & Munuera actually proposed a spin-off series for other Spirou characters (focusing on Seccotine and on the youth of Zorglub, the Count of Champignac and Miss Flanner) back during their run on the series, but nothing came of it at the time. More recently, Dupuis have had success with Choc, a spin-off series by Éric Maltaite and Stéphan Colman about the villain from Tif et Tondu (a series most famously drawn by Maltaite’s father, Will, who also co-created the “Monsieur Choc” character). So hopefully the interests of artist and publisher now align to a greater extent than during Munuera’s first go at Spirou.
Amazon has a plot synopsis:
Zandra, sixteen years old, is out on a movie date with her boyfriend, André, when zorgbots fall on them them and abduct her… to bring her by force back to her father, Zorglub. The conversation that follows doesn’t exactly make the young girl any happier, and things get worse from there. Until the point where Zorglub, in a rage and by mistake, triggers a laser beam that turns a whole town into an island. While the brilliant inventor tries to make amends to his daughter and the unfortunate André escapes as best he can from the killer robots to find Zandra, a politician annoyed at having been refused the sale of a “separatist” ray attacks the base with armed soldiers. And to make matters even worse, Zandra discovers the truth about her origins – a truth she would rather never have learned. Everything’s going wrong in the land of Z!
Meanwhile, fnac has a provisional cover (see top) and a four page excerpt:
And Munuera has also been posting more samples on his Facebook page:
“The Daughter of the Z” is expected to start serialization in the Journal de Spirou on 8. March, and the album to come out 5. May.
damnit, I hope an English publisher picks it up
Cinebook Ltd: Franco-Belgian Graphic Novels in English has announced that “Z is for Zorglub” is their next Franquin album, so maybe after that they’ll be interested in the spin-off as well?
No promises, but we’re intrigued at the very least – bear in mind there’s still a LOT of the original material to translate, including a good deal of Zorglub-rich stuff.
Patience, my friends, patience!
I see you’re publishing Alone / Seuls by Gazzotti and Vehmann. That would mean that this year will see movie adaptations of three of your licensed series; Valerian, Billy and Buddy and Alone… Although the last two might not travel far away from the Francophone market…
(Billy and Buddy and Alone both originated in the Spirou magazine, by the way, so these movies might merit a notice on this blog… And also Zombillennium by Arthur de Pins…)
What I wonder about is, will this series be regarded as canon in the main series, or will it for all intents and purposes be an entirely separate universe? It could get messy and confusing.
Yeah, it’s a good question. I would suspect it will be like the Marsupilami series, where they’re technically in the same universe but almost never interact. The question is what this means for using Zorglub in future Spirou & Fantasio adventures.
André is black, but I’d guess he’s named after Franquin.
Also, I see that Munuera’s working language is Spanish.