Méga Spirou 13

This story takes place on a tiny, far-flung island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose nearest neighbor is Madagascar, 500 kilometers away… In 1760, the Utile, a ship carrying black slaves from Africa, was shipwrecked here and abandoned by her crew. The surviving slaves had to struggle to stay alive in this desolate land for fifteen years… When this tale got back to France, it became the cornerstone of the battle of Enlightenment to outlaw slavery. More than two hundred years later, the artist Sylvain Savoia accompanied the first archeological mission in search of understanding how these men and women, who had come from the high mountains of Madagascar, had survived alone in the middle of the ocean. This is the story of that mission, through which we’re exposed to the extraordinary story of the slaves themselves.

Prolific comic book author Pierre Christin, who penned the game-changing classic sci-fi series “Valerian and Laureline,” switches to autobiography here to bring us the thoughtful, enlightening tale of two vastly different lands, the American West during the civil rights movement and the counter-culture phenomenon, and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive French artist and journalist with a love for travel, intellectual query, gypsies, and jazz. Christin and his faithful road companion and “Valerian” co-creator Jean-Claude Mézières drive across landscapes ranging from Utah to Bulgaria in a series of cars each more dilapidated than the next, encountering people and adventures of all kinds in a story that is part travel journal, part geo-political documentary, and part artistic coming-of-age.

Belgium, 1940. The German army is spreading across Europe, and tiny Belgium is conquered in 18 days. During the four long years of the Nazi occupation, the women of La Louvière have to figure out some way to stay alive, to live their lives, and to keep up hope. Their world is drawn through teenage Marcelle’s journal: What does she do? How do her family members endure? Which women in town collaborate with the occupying forces, and which women choose to fight? As always in wartime, the women take over for the absent men and keep their world spinning.

Today, Philippe is celebrating his birthday. 53-years-old already. He has a nice
house, grown-up children, a gregarious mother and a fantastic new bicycle. It’s
a nice, simple, honest life. But Philippe’s boss throws a spanner in the works
when he informs him that he’s making Philippe redundant. Philippe, a collateral
victim of globalization, goes under and loses everything, even the roof over
his head. But this plunge into the core of himself enables him to see others in
a new way. Honest people are anything but commonplace.

In this documentary comics we meet Belgian journalist Pascale Bourgaux as she travels with a cameraman back to a small village in the north of Afghanistan that she has been visiting regularly for ten years. The village is controlled by the warlord and resistance fighter Mamour Hasan, who fought to expel the Taliban from his land just like the Russians before them. To her great surprise, she finds the people there weary of the Europeans and corrupt Afghan officials and even the warlord’s own sons seem ready to welcome the return of the Taliban. This book uses the pacing and observational skills of artists Vincent Zabus and Thomas Campi to give a palpable sense of daily life in this troubled, faraway land as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse of two seasoned journalists at work.

“Before, there were trees and countryside. Man didn’t intervene. Stalin decided to “rectify” that space, and now, instead of trees, there are concrete buildings, everywhere. Stalin had a factory built. Thanks to that, lots of people got jobs, like my dad.”
Born in 1979, Marzi is a 7-year-old Polish girl who looks wide-eyed at the world around her: her parents, her family, her school friends and the crabby women at the grocery store who don’t even smile for a fruit delivery. Marzi lives on a council estate in an industrial town, and is a cheerful, carefree, mischievous and perceptive little girl, bound to run into many adventures!