A week ago Alain Demaret passed us a black/white version of the “Le Seigneur de Gonobutz” (“The Lord of Gonobutz”) album as prepublished in Le Soir. We presume this was in 1976 as there was also a prepublication of the story in Journal Tintin of 1976. This black and white publication had quite some hick-ups. Today we’ll discuss one already, namely 2 text balloons which remained empty, until 1983.

The page we discuss is page 26 of the Bob De Moor‘s “Le Seigneur de Gonobutz”, more precisely the 3rd frame of the 3rd strip on that page where you can see a grandma shooting at militaries whilst her two grandchildren are cheering. Cheering we said? In the Le Soir version there is no text in the text balloons.

And there wasn’t one either in the Journal Tintin as far as we know (we don’t have that particular issue in our archives – if someone has that issue, don’t hesitate to let us know).

The text from these text balloons is also missing in both the Rijperman and Bédéscope versions as published in 1980 and would only pop up in 1983 in the very correctly released Barelli compendium as published by Rombaldi. The text font however was different to the one used in the rest of the story.

So for 7 years, nobody knew what those kids were exactly cheering. The missing lines are “Vas-y mémé!” and “E’core pan-pan!” which you could freely translate as “Go ahead grandma!” and “Shoot again!”. The “E’core” was used to stress that the kid is really young and doesn’t yet know how to speak well French in this case, because the correct word should be “Encore”.

Note that the BD Must version as released in 2011 includes the correct text balloons. In later posts we’ll show you that there is more to this Le Soir version which is a bit odd to say the least.