Cover detail from All the Collected Spirou Covers of Andre Franquin
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All the Collected Spirou Journal Covers by Andre Franquin

That title above is a rough translation of the book’s French name, “Toutes Les Couvertures des Recueils du Journal de Spirou par Franquin.”

It’s quite the mouthful in either language, but it’s the perfect description of the book’s contents.

All the Collected Spirou Covers by Andre Franquin book , sitting open

This is a 2017 French hardcover book that collects 22 years’ worth of Andre Franquin’s covers for the Spirou Journal collections. Often, the covers are seen side by side with a picture of the original art.

This will likely be the closest I’m ever going to get to a Franquin Artist’s Edition.

It’s pretty cool.

Background: What’s a Spirou Journal Collection (“Recueil”)?

I wrote about “The Surprising Way They Collected “Pilote” Magazine Issues” last year. After every tenth issue, they’d glue those ten issues into a hardcover binding and sell it as a collection.

Dupuis, having started Spirou Journal (see “What is Spirou Journal?”) a couple of decades before Pilote, did it first. It’s confirmed for me in this book that the collections are made up of the issues that were returned from the newsstand, unsold. Publisher Jean Dupuis was smart enough to anticipate that the newsstand copies wouldn’t all sell out. He agreed to take the unsold books back.

He’d take a recent batch of issues, glue/bind them together into hardcover editions, and sell them into bookstores and department stores. They would have a longer shelf life there compared to the magazines’ one week turnover, and reach a new audience. In fact, the books sold particularly well in places like Quebec and Switzerland.

Early collections varied in how many issues they contained. Those first Spirou magazines were half or a third of the size they are today, so you could pack more issues into the book.

And, yes, 4000 issues later, Dupuis is still collecting Spirou Journal magazine issues into books. The 365th volume is due out in July 2021.

For these collections, Dupuis commissioned new covers featuring their breakout character, Spirou. After Rob-Vel (Spirou’s creator) and Jije handled the first 15 covers, Andre Franquin became the regular cover artist through volume 109.

Those covers are what this book collects.

The Format

The book starts with an overview of the first 109 collections, from 1938 to 1968. Alongside postage stamp-sized reprints, a few covers get a paragraph explaining how the covers came about. This book is in French, so the Google Translate phone app is your friend. I pointed my camera to the page and the words translated directly on my screen.

It is here we learn about the way the collected editions were packaged, as well as the places where others helped out on the covers. There’s not a commentary for every cover, unfortunately. It’s just about 15 or 20 of them. It’s enough to place them into a context and tell a story with Franquin’s long run on this assignment.

After two pages showing larger versions of 18 of the first 34 books, we get to the main part of the show: Franquin’s art.

Every cover he did from book 16 all the way through to book 109 are reprinted at full size on one page. On the facing page, where available (starting with the early 1950s covers), the original art by Franquin is reprinted in black and white at the same size as the covers. In some cases, the original colors are available, but not the original line art. In some others, only a version of the cover without the lettering on it is shown.

The book ends with a biography of Franquin and a bibliography of all his works.

Let’s Look at the Art

For the original art pages, it’s done in the same style as an IDW Artist’s Edition, in that the original color of the pages is visible. It’s not pure black and white. In fact, it’s mostly closer to yellow.

You can see some original pencil lines. You can see where Franquin clearly erased and redrew an arm a couple times before he liked what he had. You can see where the black backgrounds ended just outside the safe space on the page. You can see the (figurative) blue lines where Franquin outlined the location of the logo placement to help with his compositions.

You can also see that Franquin drew just slightly larger than the cover. In this book, the area outside the actual published parts is stark black and white, while the art that is visible on the final books maintains its original yellowed appearance.

Here’s the occasion where Franquin drew a cover featuring not Spirou and Fantasio, but his friend Peyo’s Benny Breakiron. It’s a beauty:

Collected Spirou v80 cover by Andre Franquin featuring Peyo's Benny Breakiron jumping through the town
Original art for Collected Spirou v80 cover by Andre Franquin featuring Peyo's Benny Breakiron jumping through the town

(Forgive the slight warp in the images from the book throughout this review. The book’s binding is very tight. I didn’t want to flatten it out on a scanner, so I took pictures with my phone. The pages warp a bit when you lay the book flat on its back.)

It’s a great cover that’s even greater when you look closer at the small town and read the signs and appreciate the little details:

Detail of the town drawn by Andre Fanquon,seen on Spirou collection #80
Just look at those railings on the far left, and the way he draws small parts of roofs. Such tiny details, but they sell the cover.

The most fascinating thing about this book is watching Franquin’s art style evolve over the course of twenty years. If you’ve read enough of his Spirou stories, this doesn’t come as a surprise. His final style is still my favorite and the way I think most people picture his art. But you can also see his atomic style period, which looks a little closer to a more iconic ligne claire style.

It’s hard to tell from these covers just when, exactly, Franquin started to move away from that atomic style. It’s a slower evolution than I first expected.

If you go all the way back to the start, though, you’ll see how he began in a style closer to Rob-Vel’s initial Spirou designs. It feels very old-timey to me. It feels like a turn of the century comic strips style. The difference is the same as you’d see in American comics between 1940 and 1960, though, or in the world of animation. Picture Warner Bros’ classic Bugs Bunny shorts and how much they evolved from his first appearance in 1940 through to the 1960s. As time marches on, designs just change.

You’ll also see how the cover design changes over that time. The most drastic change for me is in the last 15 or 20 covers, when suddenly you can feel the editorial mandate to sell all the characters in the book, and not just Spirou and Fantasio. They were always the cover subjects, though Marsupilami moved in at one point and threatened to take over.

Then, all of a sudden, crowds marched down the cover with signs featuring the other characters in the magazine, like a Smurf and Boule and Bill. They appear in other covers as the backs of playing cards and signs on the outside of a hot air balloon.

Spirou Collection v95 cover painted by Andre Franquin
Spirou Collection v95 cover painted by Andre Franquin

The cover to this book is reused from that era. It’s the cover of volume 95, featuring a bullet list of all the characters with stories in the book. It’s a long list. The art presented alongside that particular cover features the original painting for the cover without all the text over the art.

Especially with the earliest covers, there isn’t original art available. Thankfully, the original color art was available for some of those later books, so the cover is seen face to face with just the colors that are visible under the line work. These were covers that Franquin painted in gouache, with a separate ink line layer. There are one or two examples of that in this book where you get to see both the black and white version as well as the painted version. It feels very much like someone turned off the Photoshop layer with the line work on it to reveal the colors.

Then there’s a case like this, where the color guide shows us a different cover from the final:

The cover of Spirou v51 shows Spirou not punching anyone.
The color guides for the cover of Spirou v51 shows Spirou not punching anyone.
The color guides for the cover of Spirou v51 shows Spirou not punching anyone.

This cover was before he started bringing out the gouaches. These colors are merely a guide, I’d guess, and appear to be drawn with colored pencils. I’m guessing that editorial didn’t like their mascot character being seen punching someone directly on the cover, so you wound up with a less violent image?

Book Design

The book is 172 pages. Once you get to the covers section, the pages are numbered by the volume of the collected Spirou edition. When there’s an alternate version of the cover, there are two of the same page numbers, but with an “A” and “B” label on them.

It’s an 8.5″ x 12″ hardcover, which makes it the same size as the original magazines, so you get the cover art reprints at full size.

Here’s an issue of the magazine from 1954 sitting on top of the book:

An issue of Spirou Journal from the 1950s sits atop the hardcover compilation of Franquin's covers of the same size.

I don’t know what size Franquin drew at. I’m guessing the original art in the book is slightly shrunk down, but I’m OK with it if it is. It’s just a thrill to see these original art boards in a book as affordable as this.

Andre Franquin draws the issue numbers for all of his Spirou Collected edition covers

One of the things I love about the book design is how it incorporates the lettering in it. The back cover shows a list of all the book numbers with Franquin covers. But it’s all the numbers as they appeared on the covers. Some are hand drawn. The last couple rows are mostly fonts, but there’s still a lot of ones Franquin drew in himself. You can see them laid out on some of the covers in the original art, as a matter of fact.

Cover lettering from Andre Franquin's Spirou covers
A list of six different logos for the publisher, Dupuis

The title page of the book includes six different variations of the Dupuis logo. That’s followed by two pages of hand drawn lettering extracted from the cover copy. It’s all isolated word balloons and titles and sound effects. If you like comics lettering, you’ll appreciate these.

The inside front and back cover has a picture of the spines of all the Spirou collections. With a little overlap in the middle, it runs from a couple of books that don’t have numbers on their spines but are probably in the 20s somewhere, all the way to books 105 – 109 on the inside back cover.

Series of spines of Collected Spirou hardcover books

Those are the little additions that make a book like this great. Franquin’s art is the star, but the little extras in those design choices puts it over the top.

If you find one of these books on eBay today, expect to pay a bunch for them. I’ve seen some of the earlier ones going for hundreds of dollars.

Recommended?

Front cover for "All The Covers of the Collected Spirou by Andre Franquin" art book

Yes, if you’re a big Franquin fan, or a Marcinelle school fan. It’s surprisingly affordable and available through Amazon.com on Prime, at the time I bought it. It’s as close to a Franquin art book as I’m likely to come. The book is in French, but there’s not that much writing in it. I’d have loved to see even more. I’m still learning about this stuff, so every scrap of information I can get is something I crave.

You can pick it up on Amazon today. (That’s an affiliate link, so I’ll cut a small cut of the sale but it won’t cost you any extra.)


What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)

11 Comments

  1. The Franquin covers are what originally prompted me to start collecting those reliures, then I expanded as I attended more and more auctions in Paris and in Bruxelles, as an adult. I’m looking at my shelf right now, I have about 45 of them, ranging from number 19 (a Rob-Vel cover) to number 363 from last year (20 bucks from Amazon, due to pandemic closures). The bulk of it are indeed the Franquin ones. It’s hard to tell which ones the master drew by himself or through his studio assistants, as they get more polished you can kinda tell.
    Those reliures also gave me the opportunity to read in installments so many stories for which I would never have bought the albums at the time. They were a fun way to sample the contents of the magazine. And if you found a random volume at a local bookshop, you absolutely had to be on the lookout for the next volume to see how some of the stories finished. It was so exciting for this pre-teen in the early days of collecting BD’s silver age.

  2. This was first available in 2013 as a 34 cm x 49 cm hardcover (119,00 €) which I believe shows the original art at full size. Amazon Canada (https://amzn.to/3vRwJKK) teases it’s “temporarily out of stock” but I doubt it. I ordered a copy of the 2017 version from Indigo (a Canadian Amazon competitor). For some reason both the original and the smaller collection you reviewed are both listed as softcovers.

    I’ve been picking up AE format Franquin books from Dupuis and Marsu Productions and Franquin’s original art is stunning at full size:

    https://aeindex.org/reviews/la-mauvaise-tete-version-originale/
    https://aeindex.org/reviews/le-prisonnier-du-bouddha-lintegrale/

  3. I just realise that this volume has 12 more pages than the previous version of this book from 2013 (different cover), so I’d be curious to know what they added this time.

  4. Will this ever be translated into English at all by Fantagraphics or Cinebook at all?

    1. I wouldn’t count on it, sadly. Or, if they did, they’d have to commission a lot more text to explain Andre Franquin and Spirou Journal to the American readers. I’d buy that book, but I’m afraid not enough other people would….

    1. Just my take, but Spirou and Fantasio are intensely Franco/Belge and inhabit a special world where the drawing style itself conveys very emotional responses, along with great characters, stories, and detail. Dynamic movement, exaggeration, and very european sensibilities abound. There is also, at times, a sense of melancholy in the images of old rooftops, odd characters of the street, and places like the Count of Champignac’s estate. This does not quite translate into English as does Tintin, where a more realistic, fact-based imagery exists. You do not find Zorglub in Tintin… you find Rastapopoulos.
      Zorglub and his entourage, style and story line are less translatable, in my opinion. ( could be fun to try ! ) The glorious country scenes of old farms, little villages, wistful fall days may be understood in a British context, less in the US. “Tintin in America” probably spells out the issue best. Tintin goes with the flow. He accepts the environment and it latches on to him. Tintin is definitely a more worldly figure inhabiting a clean , direct style and line. One can’t mistake the clarity.

      All my opinion. As the world population homogenizes, all this will be moot in the end !

      1. I would agree with you for the most part, for a good many years I followed some Brits like Paul Gravett who did a decent job of bridging the culture gap between BD and the english-speaking world. But those were few and far between, compared to french scholars.
        I do find glimpses of Zorglub and Rastapopoulos is Silver Age US comics, at Marvel, early Dr Doom, Red Skull, Modok are very much in the same vein, minus the twinkle in the eye that Michel Greg, who created Zorglub for Franquin, would put in all his works (Achille Talon is a masterpiece but totally untranslatable, unless you count Frasier). At DC, many Silver age villains from the John Broome/Gardner Fox/Bob Haney/Arnold Drake cloth would fall in the same category. I felt very much in that territory when I was following those over-the-top grandiose/silly stories translated into cheap french periodicals of my youth. Later you could still find traces of those in the works of Peter David or Marv Wolfman, Paul Levitz on LOSH, and I’m sure a few others that I can’t remember off the top of my head.
        In later years, those villains veered more towards Olrik, only to become, sadly, the cold-blooded mass murderers that they are today under hacks like Bendis, Waid or Johns. It’s sad.
        Augie, you should review the recent Zorglub revival and compare to the 60s version, that would be fun.

  5. In 1975, during a trip to France to visit family, I was able to visit with Jijé and Franquin.

    It all started when I was little and was exposed to the Spirou, Tintin, Lucky Luke etc ! world. I lived within those pages. I dreamt of drawing like those artists. ( I did become an illustrator ( children’s books ) and very hobbyist comic artist. I would spend hours drawing Franquin hands, lamps, rooftop scenes and the characters ) As time moved on, My family moved from Lewisboro NY to Manchester VT. And who would rent our house in NY . . . . Jijé ! His daughter was married to an art teacher at nearby St Lukes’ School. ( my high school ). So I met him at our old house where he demonstrated some classic Jerry Spring style images.

    Back to France. Having been invited to stop by Jijé’s just south of Paris, I took him up on it. Fascinating conversations ensued about art, styles, gossip, and politics. Later on in the trip during a second visit, I mentioned that I was hitch-hiking back to Brussels to catch my return flight. He said :” you know, I could talk with André (Franquin) and he could put you up for a few nights while you wait your flight .” Did I fall out of my chair ? Most likely…

    So Brussels. Meet up with Franquin. Unknown to me, Franquin was laid up in bed having suffered a mild infacture of the heart. Can’t believe the generosity with him being in that situation. They put me up in his “studio” apartment where, laid out on every surface and hung and taped to walls was original art of Spirou and Fantasio, Gaston LaGaffe, the Houba . . . older things and half finished new pieces to return to. I did not take anything ( I felt as if this was a sacred place where many fabulous images were born and where many of the great comic artists met and created ) except the astonishing visual buffet. A small explosive incident ( a bottle of hydrogen peroxide had been unfortunately poured into a glass bottle, previous to my stay. Not good ) in the apartment led to Franquin presenting me with an original drawing the next day. A classic gaston disaster scene with the line :” excuse me ! it was an ongoing experiment” … I have to say, this drawing is precious to me, as is the time with Franquin. At that time he was looking for someone to translate Spirou into english. How did I not jump on that ! It is hard to really know someone and I don’t claim to in this case, but >>> what a gracious, generous, unbelievably talented and interested/interesting person.

    Well, this is just one of countless encounter stories with special people that exist in the world. Nothing amazing, really. Just a bit of my dreams came true.

    My extensive collection of hardbound and magazine editions always follow me around and await my next visit. Merci Gaston !

    1. Hi Marshall. Your story is amazing. Indeed Jijé (Joseph Gillain) being the mentor/inspirator of both Franquin and Jean Giraud (Jerry Spring is Blueberry before Blueberry, just what Valérian is to Star Wars) and also of a whole generation of the Marcinelle school is often overlooked in modern BD history. That is understandable, since his students did so many great things, but he is the wing beneath their wings, to use a tired american cliché.