In this story, Spirou and Fantasio (assisted by their friend, the Count of Champignac, as well as by Spirou's sarcastic squirrel Spip and the amazing Marsupilami, a strange jungle creature with a fantastically long tail) face up against the crazed scientist Zorglub, who can hypnotize people with a mind-control ray. However, technical malfunctions and Zorglub's own temperament keeps thwarting his nefarious plans.

We pick up the story just as one of these mishaps has put Fantasio in the hospital...






The heroes face off against Zorglub's machines and his armies of mind-controlled "zorgmen" in multiple confrontations (including one where Fantasio gets kidnapped and, quite literally, brain-washed), until finally tracking him down to his secret base. There they witness his great master plan:




I won't give away the ending, an unexpected and hilarious twist that follows logically from everything up to that point. The story, by Franquin and Greg, is a great little time capsule from the late 50s/early 60s, satirizing the new modern era's fascination with advertising and electrical gizmos, the nascent space race, and providing a very Bond-like supervillain (three years before the first James Bond movie). And you gotta love the sleek 50s functionalism in the design of the chairs, the lamps and the sofas!

Z is for Zorglub is the only Spirou story that is relatively easy to get hold of in English. In 1995, Fantasy Flight Publishing put it out in a witty translation by Kim Thompson (the source of these scans), and copies can be found on Amazon and eBay. Unfortunately the company folded before they had a chance to release the sequel, The Shadow of Z, even though Thompson had already completed the translation. Supposedly a bunch of the books are available in English in India, but the publisher doesn't respond to online orders or other inquiries. One of the later books by Tome & Janry is set to be released by a British publisher later this year, so hopefully more of this excellent series will soon become accessible in English.