By Tome & Janry
Publisher: Cinebook
ISBN: 978-1-84918-011-5
Back at the beginning of the year I was asked to teach a course in Winchester to get adults into cartooning. One of the students was from Portugal, and he spent quite some time enthusing about his personal favourite, Spirou and Fantasio. Unable to lay his hands on a Portuguese copy for me, he managed to get a family member to e-mail across a couple of scanned pages, and I rather liked it, but it looked like that was going to have to be it. So I was rather pleased recently to see that Cinebook have gone to the trouble to create an English language version, and of the very book I saw the pages from.
Spirou and Fantasio are adventurous reporters (in comics, are there any other kind?) who in this tale travel to the rescue of an old friend in Australia. The art has lovely fluid brushwork that makes for dynamic character movements, really lending itself to the slapstick. Always the mark of a good strip, I found myself hovering over the individual panels to see just how it was done. It's a shame the colouring wasn't a little better in places (you really struggle to make out the features of the Aborigines) but that's a minor quibble. And do look out for the Aborigine elder's spiritual hand gestures for a bonus, if unintentional, chuckle.
And if you liked that: You'll have to wait until this time next year for book 2!
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