Will - Lot 31

Will WILL TIF ET TONDU Le Roc maudit (T.18), Dupuis 1972 Original cover. The title is a reproduction affixed to the original. Signed. India ink on paper 23.5 × 32.3 cm (9.25 × 12.72 in.) In 1968, Yvan Delporte was fired from the editorial staff of Spirou, and Maurice Rosy, who didn't get on well with Thierry Martens, the new editor-in-chief, began to go off on his own to pursue a career as an illustrator in Paris. He left the company in 1971. For some years now, Maurice Tillieux had been the Journal de Spirou's orchestral scriptwriter. He was called in to help with Tif et Tondu. Rosy had already brought a touch of realism to the adventures of the bearded and hairless man. With Tillieux, the series took a more hard-boiled turn. But the Gil Jourdan illustrator was running out of time, as he was constantly working on scripts. So he recycled the Félix stories he had designed for Héroïc-Albums. Le Roc maudit is a remake of Le Phare de la mort and its sequel, Le Cinquième Cadavre. With two originally relatively short episodes (26 plates in all), Tillieux developed a story that allowed him to add two car chase scenes - an exercise in which he excelled - and a formidable climax in the sequence where Tondu finds himself trapped in a boat under the sea. It's faithfully reproduced here in this ideally composed cover, with its two masses of black at the top left and bottom right, drawing a diagonal line crossed in depth by a vanishing line pointing towards the danger threatening the diver.