XIII to be published by cinebook!

Folks,

Some very good news! XIII will be released by Cinebook (one every 2 months) which means the entire series will run in 3 years! This is great! If you have not read XIII I strongly recommend it!

Press release: http://www.cinebook.co.uk/documents/090828CineBookPressReleaseXIII.pdf

I seem to recall that it was released by Marvel (of Spider-Man fame) a few years ago. What became of that version?

Starting May 2010 it seems. It looks like Cinebook are planning to put out single volumes instead of double volumes for the majority of their series from here on; at least if the prices on Amazon are anything to go by. That's a shame because those doubled-sets were good value and a more involved read.

As for Marvel's version, you can read more on that debacle here.

George

Thanks for that George. Let's hope that this version will be better handled.

mct16, actually if you want you can pick up the first five issues of XIII published by the Marvel subsidiary for 3-4 US$. Plenty are available on ebay. In case you don't want to wait for the first year for the 6 issues to come out :-).

Thanks, but according to the forum that George pointed to it would appear that Marvel's version "was censored, and with reduced pages" and I can't stand that sort of thing.

It seems that there is a lot of the IRA in this series, especially towards the conclusion. What's its take on the Northern Ireland Troubles? Do it glamorise or criticize the Republicans or does it take an impartial view of the situation?

That seems to be the case for Largo Winch anyway which is a shame since all the stories are two parters and the double format suited that well.

No hope that they'll start publishing them in the correct size, I suppose?


Then you can forget about Cinebook: they have already censored Largo Winch and Aldebaran, albeit with the permission of the authors.

They've already done a couple of thin, small, albums for some of the other series. I think The Scorpion had one like that, and maybe Alpha (or whatever it is called). I suppose this makes sense if there's a three-album story but, as you point out, for Largo it is a backwards step.


Is there much censorable in XIII? I have to admit to only seeing the Catalan and Marvel editions and don't recall there being too much sauce in there to cover up. The recent Largo Winch book had quite a clever piece of censorship actually; certainly nothing like the ham-fisted changes they've made to Alderbaren.

George

It's been announced that the latest XIII will be out next month (in French).

It's entitled "Le Jour du Mayflower" ("The Day of the Mayflower") and apparently it is connected to the Pilgrim Fathers's ship. So it appears to be a case of XIII going back into more than his own past.

There is a new team working on it: writer Yves Sente and artist Youri Jigounov.

This appears to be the third series in which Sente takes over from Van Hamme: they both wrote separate "Blake and Mortimer" books, and Sente has even taken over his other series "Thorgal".

Van Hamme is currently working on a series called "Lady S" which, like "XIII" and "B & M", deals with espionage. I wonder who he has in mind as a potential successor?

Yves Sente has been in London for the past two days (at least) attending the Comica event, although no questions were asked about anything other than Blake & Mortimer (the next volume of which will be set in Oxford with the Ashmolean playing a part by all accounts).

That has no bearing on XIII though so, uh...

George