Bill's Dog Mind

Throughout my full first vacation week, (With a horrific pain in my back) I was on a sort of bookstore that sells lots of comics, graphic novels, Mangas and even so, board games and toys of any franchises and then, I was fallen to this particular one: L'avis de chien came from the creative genius of Yvan Delporte, the real-life Spirou chief editor from its peak years. He wrote all the columns "telling" by Bill himself, while Jean Roba made the painful task to drawn and colored all the artworks with watercolor colors. Historians Christelle and Bertrand Pissavy-Yvernault were parts reponsibles of the issue we'll known back it was their biggest 60th anniversary bonanza... in 2019!

Released in the original Spirou magazine from 1967 and 1977, these thirty-two columns are very rare gems in a way we probably never seen the light of the day anytime soon. This book worth $42 for that alone, when it's not just your typical 44-gags book like it is for decades the norm.

(At this day, we may assume that this is a complete edition, but we'll not quit sure. Fewer can may sleeping to the vaults.)

While I am not always in fine form with the current Dupuis policies, I have to give them credits for preserving their past history with rare archives like these and be released in a one-of-a-kind book. The illustrations themselves are very lovely to look at, proving that Roba was a real artist in the mind unless most today's AI-artists and their penchant for pointless details to things that don't asked that much.

There is one 33th column that were released in 2005 by Laurent Verron, Roba's ex-pupil and oh-so-brief Boule & Bill artist of this era. That just keep me the conclusion that Verron was better to drawn the characters than actually executed the gags.

I can't highly recommanded enough this gem at a rarity you wouldn't find otherwise than in a very niche bookstore. In this age of generic heroic fantasy made by Wokes, parts of the greatest creative forces comes from teamwork and that the best universes all around have to do with the ups-and-downs of the daily days of average-class people. Roba and Delporte have understood that back in 1967.