Speciale Kiwi N. 15
Le Sachem sans plumes
Although Blek is on the cover he doesn't appear inside, instead we have two stories; Zembla and Zagor.
The French story of the Spirit with the Ax is a testimony to the success of Zagor abroad. It is, in fact, an adventure created beyond the Alps a couple of years after "La foresta degli agguati", Zagor's first story. France was in fact, the first of the foreign countries to which Zagor was exported. It was published in January 1962 by the Editiones Lug of Lyon, which also printed other Bonelli material, given the good relations between Sergio Bonelli and the publisher Marcel Navarro. The King of Darkwood was so successful that the French market absorbed more stories than Italians could produce. Bonelli was therefore asked to allow "extra" adventures to be created to be published across the border.
In total three were released: two of these, which had texts written by my Guido Nolitta and which had been drawn by regular collaborators of Lug, such as Enzo Chiomenti and Mario Cubbino, were also published in Italy in the Collana Lampo series. The third, however, which was not written by Nolitta, came out in France in 1963 in Special Kiwi N. 15: it was entitled " Le Sachem Sans Plumes ", and has remained unpublished in Italy until 2012.
The reason? Probably because Bonelli always considered this episode a sort of "apocryphal" product, having been created outside of his control and resulting, perhaps for this very reason, rather distant from the standards with which he have always tried to characterize, and therefore make our comics recognisable.