Sherpa has indeed discontinued Capricorne. It was a hard decision we took for multiple reasons. Unfortunately I cannot go into that. We are not happy with it and we know Andreas fans won't be either. You may assume another Dutch publisher will continue the series or start it anew. Lombard has not taken a decision in this matter. There is no conflict with Andreas, of whom we will publish several albums in the near future.

I don't recall when the contact with Andreas first started. I interviewed him several times at the time, especially for StripSchrift. In any case our first important project was the legal edition of Cromwell Stone. when Peter Kuipers and me still worked for Zet.El (publisher of ZozoLala). The album only existed in an illegal, badly translated and lettered edition. We wanted to republish this book as it should have been done (and we did, in 1986), but since we heard that many illegal albums had been sold we did not dare to print too many: 525 copies. In hindsight, we could have made much more of them. We reprinted the book with Sherpa (again in a limited edition, since we thought sales would be limited in this third edition) but the album appears to be a classic and may be reprinted again.
The most important contact with Andreas dates from this publication (Andreas drove all the way from France to Nijmegen to sign all copies at our house, and from the time the readers of StripSchrift chose Rork as comic of the year, which we celebrated with a special Andreas-stripschrift, the publication of Monster which he made especially for Stripschrift, and his visit to Breda.

On 'De Vergetenen'
This is actually the first time we made a (partial) color production. The album does not exist in another edition. It is contentwise very powerful, I think. It contains quite a few graphical beauties from Andreas' work, that most lovers of Andreas work don't know. Just when I decided not to publish the book because of technical reasons, and to return all materials to the author, I had a good look at it and decided, that it really was worth the while and had to be published.
So it finally worked! (fortunately)
As for the financial side: it should have been a commercially interesting book because of a cooperation with Lombard for the French market, who where at one time interested and at another time not and postponed it so long eventually, that I decided Sherpa should have to do it by itself, and that we could no longer postpone it (for one thing because of the author, from whom we had borrowed the originals all of that time); you can imagine I wanted to have them back in France safely as soon as possible...
In any case: commercially the album will not be a success, because we made this production exclusively for the Dutch audience, and I chose not to make a limited luxe edition for 1000 fans, that I can sell expensively (and for which there will always be a market) but instead an edition that is as cheap as possible and that is yet (a bit) luxurious...

Capricorne
Lombard will continue the series in the spring of 2003.

Just after publication of Le triangle rouge and Le retour de Cromwell Stone, Le Lombard published the album Styx by Philippe Foerster and, again, Andreas. Foerster wrote the scenario and made pencil drawings. Andreas was responsible for the inking of the pencilwork.

The appearance of Styx (1995, Le Lombard) means that there have been published three albums of Andreas by three diverse publishers in a short period of time. This is confusing to the customer, who will likely not buy all three books, but will make a choice, because of financial restrictions. Publishers, too, will not be pleased with this situation: their author appears to be distributed over several publisher's lists, and the excess of Andreas has probably a negative effect on sales figures.
I asked representatives of Arboris, Sherpa, and Le Lombard for a reaction.

De terugkeer van Cromwell Stone (1995, Sherpa) is even sold out. "We're still thinking about a reprint." says Mat Schifferstein (Sherpa) "Part 1 of Cromwell Stone has appeared with Zet.El and, as reprint in the K2 collection of Sherpa. Le retour de Cromwell Stone we published in the same form as the book of Zet.El. We still have to decide if we are going to do a reprint of the book as a K2 book. It would be a nice gesture to the ones that bought the first part of Cromwell Stone as K2 book. The problem is only that bookshops don't fancy the K2 collection. They find the size too clumsy and don't stock any copies. Despite this, we pursue, since we think that a series like Cromwell Stone only comes to its full right in such a large size."