Pipeline and Sundry: FCBD Canceled. Valerian On Sale. Reading in French.

French Free Comics Canceled (Sort Of)

This past weekend, the official Free Comic Book Day festivities in France were canceled due to the supply chain crisis — a combination of distribution problems and paper shortages made it impossible to stage as they wanted it to be.

Many stores went ahead and had the festivities on their own, though. You can see who appeared where in this ActuaBD.com rundown.

$25 for the Complete “Valerian and Laureline”?!?

Humble Bundle has less than a week left on their “European Sci Fi and Fantasy Comics from Cinebook” sale. For a mere $25, you can walk away with the entire “Valerian and Laureline” library, plus all volumes of “Orbital,” another Pipeline favorite.

You also get the complete “Distant Worlds” and “Aldebaran” and “Antares” series from Leo and friends.

These books will be available on Izneo.com for you in this deal, not as separate PDFs. It’s a good idea to have an Izneo account, though, so sign up and kickstart your collection today!

The sale expires on May 18, if I do my math correct. Act soon!

(Off-topic, there’s also an Image Comics 30th Anniversary sale that includes more than 100 issues of “Savage Dragon” and the first 20 collections of “Spawn,” amongst a bunch of other things. That one expires on the 14th, so hurry. And, yes, those are all PDF/CBZ/CBR downloads.)

Learning French Through Comics

This is nothing new. If you Google it, you can find plenty of suggested lists for comics that would be good books to read if you’re learning the language. I’ve talked about it before in my Duolingo journey. (I recommend “Spirou Journal” for practice. It’s relatively cheap, it’s aimed at a slighty younger reader so the language is often less challenging, and there’s a lot of different material in there. Something will catch your fancy.)

But this podcast just popped up in my podcast feed this week, so I thought I’d share. It’s the Expatlang podcast.

Degree of Difficulty: The podcast is entirely in French.

I like listening to it and picking out random words and phrases and, occasionally, entire sentences. Makes me feel good about my learning.

The list of comics they recommend is available in their show notes, though you’ll have to figure out how Anchor’s website works to find them. It’s not entirely the usual list of books. It includes “Cedric,” for example, which makes a lot of sense.

Random Thought

This doesn’t fit in anywhere else, really, so I’ll just drop this stray thought in here:

George Perez would have been an awesome artist for a Franco-Belgian album series. He was a man who took no shortcuts. He may have been a little more adventurous in his storytelling layouts, but I think he could have made it work.