Not quite true... Spirou boxes shirtless in the Franquin story ‘Spirou sur le ring’.

The magazine Cœurs Vaillants is mostly notable for introducing Tintin to France.

For an English name, how about going off the classic American adventure/detective comics of the 1940s/50s? Stuff like Rip Kirby, Steve Canyon, Agent Phil Corrigan, Kerry Drake, Steve Roper, etc. Gil certainly feels like he could be an older version of one of those heroes. Rip Corrigan?

Tumblr really is actively trying to make this site less functional.

What the hell use are tags anymore at all, then?

The Gaston Ball - An unlucky explorer

But what if there’s dancing?

A collection of translated Gaston Lagaffe comics that appear as extras in the Thunderbirds 1971 Annual.

Gaston is given the odd name of ‘Cranky Franky’ in these and Fantasio is only referred to as ‘Boss’. These may be the only time Gaston has been officially published in English. Also enjoy some of the awful cheap colouring.

Also they changed the speech balloons and added stuff where there was none in the original.

These are:

(Can’t find the first one)

Gaston 293 (the tuba one)

Gaston 402 (The coconut one)

Gaston 363 (the spain one)

It’s not quite the only official English translation. Kim Thompson ran a few gags under the name “Gomer Goof” in Fantagraphics’ Prime Cuts back in the late 80s.

Cinebooks have said they would like to publish it, but there’s some problem with getting the rights.

This article by spiroureporter is utterly fascinating – it sheds more light on a period in Spirou & Fantasio’s history that I find at once thrilling and disturbing (only because I don’t like conflict).

And how appropriate that the ship in question is an icebreaker.

Anyway… long live Tome & Janry!

Interesting. Although I do also like Nic & Cauvin and it would have been interesting to see where they would have taken the series.

So at this point T&J had only made very short comedic stories with S&F? Like this. Or not even those?

Or were they already well known for other things?

Yeah, they’d done 3 shorter stories, starting with the 8-page La voix sans maître (”The Voice Without a Master”) about an escaped hyperintelligent lab monkey, the 14-page Gare au cliché (”Beware of Photos”) where a reunion of Champignac’s old research buddies is infiltrated by gangsters (reprinted in La jeunesse de Spirou), and then The Menace that you linked to.

They had done some other comics and games features for the magazine before, and worked as assistants on the pretty popular Cubitus, but I don’t think they were particularly well known before they got Spirou.

Personally I think the first couple of pages of La voix sans maître were enough to prove that they were already better than Nic & Cauvin, and Virus is so superior to any of N&C’s albums that I think it would have been cruel to have them continue working in parallel.

Gaston 739 - His own small sanctuary

Such a classic!