Publications update (week 40/2013)

With releases by Chaland and Tome & Janry, and the announcement of a classic Yann & Conrad series, this is a good week for fans of the 80s! Or if that isn’t retro enough, how about Jijé and the Danish Journal d’un ingénu? Plus more!

For this week’s issue of Journal de Spirou, with a three-page story by Yoann & Vehlmann that “brings back” Radar the Robot (actually a model of him), see this post.

In December 1980, the young duo Yann & Conrad were set loose with a series of gags in the Journal de Spirou. Running in the only space the magazine had available, the margins above the page, the Hauts de pages (“Top of the Page”) series only lasted eight months before being shut down, having offended too many people. But since then, in part because of all the controversy, that eight-month run has become legendary. Now it is being collected in a 144-page book, Dans l’enfer des hauts de pages (“In Hell at the Top of the Page”), to be published on 15. November. Curiously, the book is not published by Dupuis, but rather through Dargaud (Astérix, Valérian, etc.). Not that it matters much: while Dargaud was once Dupuis’ arch-rival, the two publishers are now branches of the same corporation, Média-Participations.

The release date was moved back and forth several times, but Spirou par Chaland and the second Tome & Janry volume of the collected series, Spirou et Fantasio: L’Intégrale 1984–1987, were ultimately officially published this week, Friday 4. October. By those who have seen the Chaland book it is said to contain many sketches and illustrations that have never before been published, focusing on all Chaland’s Spirou projects that never came to fruition. It does not, however, include the picture-book conclusion to the comic strip that was actually completed; for that we still have to look to the version published by Champaka as Coeurs d’acier (“Hearts of Steel”).

In 2014 it’s one hundred years since Joseph Gillain, better known as Jijé, was born. InediSpirou reports that Dupuis intends to mark the anniversary with a number of publications, including a volume collecting Jijé’s Spirou stories, similar to Spirou par Rob-Vel: L’Intégrale 1938–1943 released this year (and similarly edited by Christelle and Bertrand Pissavy–Yvernault). This will fill the only significant remaining hole in the collected edition, providing an unbroken set that runs from 1938 nearly to the present. More details no doubt to follow!

Regarding the upcoming Gaston Lagaffe box set, Dupuis has confirmed that it will not include the text stories written by Yvan Delporte, mostly under the heading En direct de la rédaction (“Directly from the editors”). Some of these tie in with the comics, and some have been included in the previous Gaston album publications, so this omission unfortunately means the box set will not be a definite collection of the series.

Finally, the next publications on the schedule are now Les Robinsons du rail (“The Railway Robinsons”) on 18. October, preceded by Splint: Portræt af helten som troskyldig ung mand (“Spirou: Portrait of the Hero as a Naive Young Man”), the Danish version of Journal d’un ingénu by Émile Bravo, possibly around 7. October. To get a taste of the latter, a preview sample is available on Nummer 9.

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