These come from the 1985 album La métamorphose d’Imhotep (“Imhotep’s Transformation”).

Papyrus was a popular series that ran in Spirou magazine for over 40 years, concluding in 2015. It got turned in to an animated TV series, and Cinebook translated a number of the books for the English-speaking market.

The backstory here is that the Pharaoh Merneptah (son of Ramses the Great) came to the throne as an old man of 70yrs, evidently leaving some questions about his fitness to rule in the minds of some. The day before, agents of the high priest of Memphis managed to poison the Pharaoh, leaving him quite unable to run the yearly ‘three laps around the park’ ceremony in order to prove his vitality. Yet before the event, princess Théti-Chéri and our main character Papyrus desperately hatch a wild scheme to temporarily substitute a lookalike for Merneptah. The problem? He has a bum leg…

More backstory needed: meanwhile, Papyrus becomes temporarily trapped in an underground tomb, and inadvertently allows the rays of Ra, the sun god, to strike the vault of Thoth the ibis god (called “Imhotep” here for some reason), who’d been imprisoned there. The enormous ibis as well as countless of his mummified, yet rejuvenated followers arise…

In most books there’s a dramatic, supernatural scene like this, and I enjoyed how this one recapitulated the one in Tintin’s Inca adventure, a scene itself based on Cristoforo Colombo’s showmanship involving the 1504 lunar eclipse.

SPOILER ALERT

I should probably stop right there, buuut I’m just too tempted to share a little more of the series, as well as to wrap up this sequence. The last little bit of backstory needed is to note that after a successful side quest, a vital medicine was found to help Pharaoh recover, just in time.

Review time:
I found Papyrus to be somewhat dated and campy, but overall a fun series. It’s a bit hit-or-miss at times, but has some strong volumes, such as this one. The obvious constraint was that it ran in installments in the weekly Spirou, and had to play to its audience, not having the time to develop in a more sophisticated fashion, as with the superb Alix Senator, which shares a good bit of Egyptian world-building. That said, De Gieter interjects a surprising amount of historical detail in to the books, so there are real opportunities to learn and get some sense of what various customs and deities were like.

More on De Gieter:
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/d/degieter_lucien.htm