Look what I found in the mail today...

I just found this in my mailbox:

It's Fabrice Tarrin's new book that was published yesterday. I pre-ordered it on amazon.fr, but I'm still surprised it got here that fast.

The book contains the "Un cœur de lémurien" series that was published in Spirou magazine #3668, #3673, #3678 and #3682-#3696 from mid-2008 to early 2009.

Size-wise the book is right in the middle between Tarrin's Maki books and his Lemurien book.

The Maki books published by Dupuis have about the same size as an issue of Spirou magazine, so the pages in the magazine and the books look the same.

However, since the new book is smaller, what used to be one page in Spirou magazine is now spread over two pages, making the book twice as thick as the others with 90 pages of comics in total.

Left: Spirou magazine; Right: the book

Even though the story is fictional, if you've been following this blog for a while, you'll recognize a lot of the characters from his biographical Lemurien comics:

Fred and Cyril (who's called "Édouard" in the book)

Tarrin's mom

Cyril's parents

Lolita and Tarrin's best friend

Their personalities seem to be heavily influenced by their RL counterparts: "Édouard" is the somewhat crazy friend who likes to act cool. The Dalmatian that's based on Tarrin's friend Fred Neidhardt is this laid-back guy who sometimes unknowingly creates chaos and so on. There's even Madame Hamdouni who used to be Tarrin's landlord (or something like that) back when he was still living in Paris.

And that's what I like so much about Tarrin's stories; that all the characters are based on people he knows IRL.

Story-wise it seems to differ a bit from what was published in Spirou magazine. So far I've only flipped through it and I have yet to read the whole book, but at least the ending seems to be different. There are pages I haven't seen before and there are also some missing that I've seen in Spirou (like the New Year's Eve party for example).

I'll write a more detailed entry about the plot once I've read the whole book.

If anyone is interested in purchasing it, here are the details:

Le Parcours d'un puceau

by Fabrice Tarrin

Price: 13.90€

ISBN-10: 274930671X

ISBN-13: 978-2749306711