Spirou & Fantasio Book 2: In New York
Spirou & Fantasio Book 2: In New York, by Tome & Janry, Cinebook
IN REVIEWING Cinebook’s Spirou & Fantasio Book 1, I noted the series itself has been going a whole lot longer, from the late 1930s in fact, and many a talented cartoonist has penned the strip in that time.
Book 1 proved an uneasy introduction to Spirou & Fantasio bombarded as we were with a backlog of characters all with their own agendas, mannerisms, and running gags that those not privy to the last seventy odd years of fun and games could truly appreciate.
Cinebook’s reason for starting their English speaking collections with that story in the outback may well have been because it was Tome & Janry’s debut working on the book, or that the book took a modern turn visually. Whatever the reason, it didn’t work as effectively as it could.
Spirou & Fantasio In New York remedies its predecessor’s failings by featuring its two main protagonists, even their pet squirrel Spip is conveniently removed from the main story, albeit as part of the plot.
The story goes like this:
Financially embarrassed, our two reporters (Spirou & Fantasio of course) scrape enough together for a pizza only for its packaging to reveal them winners of a million dollar prize... The snag being they have to go to New York to collect it. They’d earlier turned down a job for the pitifully-paying Turbine Magazine for a story that needs covering in the USA, but with the magazine fronting the readies for the plane ticket off they go. This book was made back in the 80s when publishers had money, even stingy ones; though this still sounds extravagant to me, but, hey, it’s only a comic strip!
Of course, once our boys get there they hit a snag, a major one, in the form of the Mafia...
Don Cortizone and his boys have had more than their run of bad luck of late, the mobster business has taken a dive, and too many of his people are getting whacked or suffering near misses when gifts arrive only to be opened as exploding bombs...
What’s worse is their rivals, a Chinese triad, led by The Mandarin (either one hell of a shy guy or someone whose schoolboy hero must’ve been The Octopus from Will Eisner’s The Spirit) are trying to take over Mafia turf.
If it sounds like some it’s some hard-boiled crime fiction story, let me put an end to that thought now, our Italian bad boys decide it’s all down to Murphy’s Law, which is basically that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and it obviously is for them.
Don Cortizone has decided that the way to remedy this is to involve someone who’s got good luck. To this end his legitimate pizza-making company ran the million dollar prize competition under the pretext that whoever won must be lucky. How little the big Mafia guy knew...
Once in New York Spirou & Fantasio are told they can collect their prize money if they’ll help Cortizone do over The Mandarin, but the boys will have none of it; they’ve been duped, and what’s more they’re good guys and tell the big boss-man to go take a hike. But before this adventure can get short the triad do something really silly... They steal their pet squirrel!
Our boys are now on board with Cortizone’s plans to break into The Mandarin’s place over in Chinatown, and that’s when the madness truly begins.
All in all, this is a coherent fun adventure with some nicely expressive and well-exaggerated cartooning, and plenty of running gags.
There is a kind of benign prejudice or cultural imperialism that strips like this, and indeed Asterix the Gaul, are able to express, that we Brits would shy away from for fear of being cast as politically incorrect, but since the main characters themselves fall foul of any one-upmanship themselves and Spirou & Fantasio shows the folly of all humanity, I veer on the side of forgiveness here.
So, yes, a much improved collection for the casual browser to pick up on this time, and one is able to gauge better why the series has proved such a long-term international success, receiving its own animated TV series along the way.
For more information Spirou & Fantasio visit Cinebook.
Sponsored by Target Media.
