by Probably no other publication has produced as many bizarre Spirou covers as Der heitere Fridolin, which first published Spirou & Fantasio in German from 1958 to 1961 under the title Fridolin & Ferdinand. Let’s just take this, for example:
Hmm, Fantasio as some sort of medieval knight… OK. But Spirou not only seems to have become a midget – he’s riding a goat! And if you expect that the content of the magazine will provide any context, think again: the story under this cover was the fifth installment of The Marsupilami Thieves.
Some of you might already have recognized the picture as a poorly edited version of a cover by Peyo for his series Johan et Pirlouit (Johan & Peewit). Johan is also the dark-haired head in the lineup on the left. The whole thing might even make some limited amount of sense if Johan & Peewit was one of the series in the magazine. Which it wasn’t.
Apart from that, one might wonder why the lineup of profiles includes the Count of Champignac, who had not at this point appeared yet in the magazine, and a second Spirou head at the bottom – looking a bit weird because of how the neck has been cut off – plus some guy I can’t identify in between them, instead of any of the characters actually appearing in the magazine’s other series: Lucky Luke and La patrouille des Castors. But asking for logic in a Heitere Fridolin cover is a sure road to madness.
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Johan himself is also featured in the line-up as the third face from the top (already in the second issue). Makes one think that there would have been earlier plans for a Johan et Pirlouit feature along with the other Dupuis titles, but for some unknown reason, these plans never realized.