Luxury print on canvas back, limited to 499 numbered and signed copies. Contains 25 pages of unpublished sketches, watercolors and paintings, The penciled and inked plates of the album facing each other.
Brussels, 1946. A relentless heatwave hits the Belgian capital, still very marked by the Second World War. On the roofs, a leopard woman flees, pursued by two disturbing robots that look like giant pygmies, and finds refuge at the Moustic Hotel, in the attic room of Colonel Van Praag, an irascible old settler. Discovered by the latter, the statuesque young woman is wounded in the shoulder by the old man with the sensitive trigger. This is where Spirou comes in.
An unrecognizable Spirou… who started drinking! Because, unable to forget young Audrey, the heroic bellhop has developed the bad habit of regularly drowning his spleen in alcohol. The appearance of Aniota, the leopard woman, will act like an electric shock on Spirou, because the strange creature will take him on a great African adventure in search of a fetish stolen from his tribe! And after a short detour through Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Spirou and Fantasio will find themselves on the trail of Nazis (oh no, they weren’t all dead) uranium seekers who are undoubtedly pursuing dark designs.
The return of the Spirou of the “Verdigris Groom” for a Brussels-Parisian-African adventure in the immediate post-war period.
- Dupuis, July 2014
- ISBN 9782800159867
- 400 mm x 300 mm (12″ x 16″), 145 pages, hardcover
- 149.00€
- Order online:
As with all AE format material (Artist’s Editions, Artifact Editions, Gallery Editions, Art Editions, Studio Editions, etc.), this is a collection of classic comic material and I’ll be reviewing the book and not the story. For a complete list of all current and announced editions, with review links, please visit our Index. Also, see What is an Artist’s Edition and our Artist Index. This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.
Very early in my search for AE format books from Europe I came upon this volume on the Dupuis website. It shows in stock, but when you try to add it to the cart nothing happens. That was years ago and it hasn’t changed. I had just read Atom Agency Vol 1 and was blown away by Schwartz’s art style and really wanted to see his process. Unfortunately, that first volume from Editions Black and White had sold out and this volume wasn’t available, so it was forgotten. For some reason I was browsing BDFugue and came across Spirou La femme léopard Edition spéciale at a discount and with cheap shipping. It turns out they needed a lot more for shipping, but I finally had a copy!
This is not your typical AE format book: the full story is presented on the left in pencils and on the right in black and white. The right side is not the inked original art as I had hoped; there is a love affair in Europe for N&B comics, noir et blanc, at a large size. This has been the bane of my search for AE format books, as there are many N&B books at the size of original art, with no interior previews. Since no interior previews was the reason I started AE Index, it felt natural to be the guinea pig.
Not only do we get the full story, all 62 pages, but also an extensive introduction of Schwartz’s preliminaries, roughs, character designs, and anything else he doodled while working on this story. It’s an extensive and wonderful resource, but a little odd to open the book with. There are no text pieces here. We do have this opposite the title page:
Some sketched plates reproduced in this album come from low definition photographic prints, the only remaining traces of the preparatory work on these pages. We apologize for the poor quality.
This work was the subject of a limited edition of 499 commercial copies (no. from 001/499 to 499/499) and 55 non-commercial copies (no. from HC 01/55 to HC 55/55)
My copy is 090/499 written in pencil, along with Schwartz’s signature. Two of the pencil pages are clearly photographs, and I was on the fence about another.
The scan quality is excellent, with no issues. Graphite and blue pencil throughout, with lines drawn into the word balloons to present the dialogue. Most AE format books are the inks with some pencils visible, but this takes it one step back and we get to see the artist as he works through the process. Yes I would have preferred inked pages on the right, but you get the see how Schrawtz progressed from pencils to inks. There are a lot of detail in those pencils. I don’t normally include the endpapers but here they are the original art and fit in beautifully.
The design is very minimal, with a very basic titlepage, frontispiece and colophon. The art in the introduction was arranged and laid out very well.The book feels substantial in your hand, and a quarterbound cloth spine is always appreciated. No hot stamping so we don’t get anything on the spine. The story is divided into three chapters, with a coloured chapter break for each.
Production is excellent: a sewn binding of thick matte paper with minimal gloss, possibly 180gsm. Most pages lay flat when the center is smoothed. The book comes shrinkwrapped with some bubble wrap in a folding mailer that gets the book to the end use but nothing more. The colophon lists no designer or production staff so we have no idea who put this book together.
The title of this book is a mystery. The website says “Schwartz – Yann Le Spirou de … La femme léopard (Edition spéciale – Prestige)”. Not sure what to do with that. The cover isn’t any more helpful, and the title page says “Le Spirou de Schwatrz & Yann La Femme Léopard Carnet de Croquis” and the chapter break for the first chapter says “Le Spirou de Schwatrz & Yann La Femme Léopard Crayonnés et Encrages”. I went with a mashing of the website and cover. Pencils and Inks sounds good, but it’s not inks in the AE format way.
Dupuis struggled for several years trying to create a standard format for their original art books, and seem to have found what they wanted in the Artiste Éditions. This volume from 2014 is my earliest Dupuis endevour.
