The Virtues Of The Unfamiliar: On Album Spirou #272
I failed to resist this unexpectedly affordable hardback album containing ten consecutive 2003 issues of the Franco-Belgian comicbook Spirou . If only more anthology titles were collected in the form they were originally published. It makes undeniable sense to strip mine out the successive chapters of the most commercially promising strips and publish them as individual volumes. But the original issues of any mix'm'match comic have a fascination of their own. The way in which familiar and unfamiliar tales and styles sit together. The character that individual editions are lent by their unique mix of stories, editorial content and adverts. The choices made about cuts to strips now known as self-contained graphic novels. The suggestion of a single moment in time, complete with all the printed features that would never be collected in their own right, that would never get to live outside of this single context. For the reader who knows nothing of any language but Englis...