Anchoring Retro Spirou et Fantasio and Spin-off Albums
in European Comic ArtAll currencies in US Dollar
Abstract
Émile Bravo's Le Journal d'un ingénu inaugurated a growing trend of setting Spirou, Fantasio, and friends in WWII times. Bravo's acclaimed work was followed by the first instalment of a history of Spirou that also contributed to fuelling the interest in retro settings for new albums related to Spirou's universe. In this article I consider such retro albums as a whole and argue that WWII is only one of the many anchors used by authors to fill a gap in the publication history of Spirou, that as time passes, authors rely increasingly on Spirou's recovered history and on new content from retro Spirou albums to anchor their work, and that, ultimately, such works are more interested in Spirou itself rather than in history per se.
Contributor Notes
Annick Pellegrin is a graduate of The University of Sydney. Her PhD thesis is a comparative study of representations of Latin America in Franco-Belgian, Mexican and Argentinian comics. She is a columns and articles editor for Comics Forum and sits on the editorial board of Studies in Comics. Her research has been published in French, English and Spanish, most recently in The Journal of Comics & Culture, the journal Atlantide and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies. She also guest edited (with María Celina Bortolotto) an issue of JILAR dedicated to the Argentine Roberto Fontanarrosa. gpel6634@alumni.sydney.edu.au