Gipsy is a French science fiction comic series drawn by Italian-Swiss artist Enrico Marini and written by Thierry Smolderen. The eponymous main character is a charismatic Romatruck driver who works on a worldwide net of motorways as a freelance trader with his own large truck. The series is drawn in a style that combines elements from the ligne claire school, American comics, and Japanese manga, and was first published in 1992 by Dargaud. It has six volumes so far published as of 2010. It has also been translated from the original French to German, Dutch, Danish and English, and rights have been sold in multiple other languages.
Setting
The series is set in a near future where ozone layer damage has forced all air travel to be abandoned, while the world is now spanned by an interconnected mega-motorway system called C3C. At the same time, global cooling has intensified, and large areas of the globe are covered in snow, inhospitable and difficult to cross, but also allowing land connections via the northern arctic. This stylistic tool allows the series to imagine a globalized future world where it still takes weeks to travel from one point to another, and where private truckers and megacorporations compete over lucrative freight. It also allows the series individual books to be set pretty much anywhere in the world, often travelling through remote and dangerous areas. The comics have so far been set in the arctic from Alaska to Siberia, in Mongolia, fictional Middle Eastern and Latin American countries as well as in Germany.
Characters
;Tsagoi ;Oblivia
English translations
introduced the series to the English speaking audience in 1995. In some countries one of the stories has been censored by ripping out a page of thousands of copies of the November 1997 issue. The magazine offered readers replacement for a small fee. Stories published in Heavy Metal Magazine were:
At one stage in 2000, the comic was set to become the base for a major live-action movie produced by Barry Levine, with Demian Lichtenstein to direct. However, this project apparently fell through in the early stages.
