I just read the first volume of Blueberry and thoroughly enjoyed it. Blueberry himself is a bit like corto maltese - slightly roguish yet a man with principles - so that makes him slightly unpredictable as to which way he will go when presented with events until you start to understand him more as a complex character. In this volume the actions of the 2nd in command at fort navajo lead to whole apache region rising in revolt after years of peace. good story, some nice art and i think it was translated into english so one should be able to find it cheap and cheerful

Of course, it's okay. The more the merrier!

So far I've read the first three volumes of Blueberry (the Epic editions) and have yet to read the fourth; I snagged them all from ebay and really want to get the fifth and apparently most expensive volume soon. I did, however, snag all three volumes of The Incal recently and can't wait to dive into that. (Beyond Blueberry, I've read the first four volumes of Moebius stuff re-printed in the Epic line back in the 80's. Airtight Garage was amazing. The first time I've ever read something "dreamlike" done justice in comics.)

(Re-posted from the original Classics Board).

Thanks again to Dizzy D for reviving this thread!

France and Belgium have a long tradition of excellent comics, not all of which are that well known in the Anglo-Saxon world. This tradition is built partly on a very old legacy of illustration (who hasn't been awed by the work of Gustave Doré?), but also on the very fortunate encounter between American and European sensibilities when the art of the bande dessinée was being set up in the first half of the XXth century.

During WWII and the German occupation, American comic strips were obviously banned in occupied Europe. Because readers wanted to know what their heroes would be doing next, many future greats provided their own versions of Tarzan or Flash Gordon, splicing their own stories on the ones started by Hogarth and Raymond and honing their skills for what was to come later. A few years after the war, creators like Goscinny, Morris or Mézières would spend considerable time in the U.S. (Mézières was a cowboy in Utah!); meanwhile, people like Albert Uderzo would change a personal style heavily influenced by Walt Disney to one that was genuinely unique.

A big difference between the Franco-Belgian comics and American ones is that the former were not distributed as a periodical pamphlet. For many decades, they were serialized in weekly journals (Coeurs Vaillants, Pif, Mickey, Tintin, Spirou, Pilote). They were also frequently not meant as pure entertainment; Coeurs Vaillants, for example, was a catholic publication and it's not surprising that the stories it featured would contain some didactic or moralistic material (and that's not necessarily a bad thing). The stories would later be collected in books, usually hardcovers, which means Franco-Belgian comics were treated as "real" books (albeit ones aimed at children) and available in regular bookstores. This granted them a certain respectability and a wider readership than if they had been confined to specialty shops.

In this thread, I want to cover series that are maybe not as widely known as they deserve to be (or just some that I find cool). With the advent of new technology that makes dissemination of printed work easier, maybe they'll all be available in several languages some day.

The first one is a historical series going back to 1948 : Alix. It depicts the many adventures of a young man during the last days of the Roman Republic, which serves as a very rich background and an endless source of revoltin' developments!

Alix was born in Gaul, and as a small boy ended up in the eastern part of the Roman world. (Alix' father was a soldier in a Gallic corps fighting the Parthians for Rome; of his mother we know nothing). Captured and orphaned at a young age, he was a slave to the Parthians in the city of Khorsabad until the city fell to the Romans.



This is the first images from my 1956 copy of Alix l'intrépide, the beginning of the series. The art is still a bit stiff, very classical-looking, but we can see that much research has been invested in getting the architecture, the clothes and the uniforms right. The plot is a little like Ben-Hur (well... make that a LOT like Ben-Hur) but since the comic was published before the Charlton Heston movie, I'm sure that can be forgiven.

Alix would be adopted by a respectable Roman noble in this story and so become a Roman citizen. He'd also gain the friendship and gratitude of Gaius Julius Caesar, who was getting ready for what would be the siege of Alesia (and the final conquest of Gaul).

The Alix series is now more than 60 years old. Its creator, Jacques Martin, belongs to the clean line school that prevailed in the 40s and 50s and his studio formed generations of talented creators (some of whom continued the series after Martin reduced his own contribution for reasons of age).

As with many such long-lived series, quality would vary depending on the period studied. The first 30 years (which is REALLY impressive!!!) deserve to be read by everyone, as they give a fun and instructive view of the Roman world circa 50 BC. Historical events are often the starting point of an adventure, even if they happened a long time before 50 BC. For example, in the story "the lost legions", reference is made to Brennus' siege of Rome in 390 BC. (That's the famous episode of the capitol geese)!



And why deny us the pleasure of a famous citation or two?

Classic scenes from literature were also frequently depicted. The fall of Alesia and the surrender of Vercingetorix in the second graphic novel; the terrible scene of the Carthaginians immolating their own children to their god Moloch-Baal (also seen in Gustave Faubert's novel Salammbo).



The series reached truly epic levels from time to time, as in the book "The last Spartan" (that's more a graphic opera than a graphic novel)!

Here we learn that after the fall of Greece to the Romans, a fortified city of Spartans continued living in secrecy, preserving their independence, and sometimes capturing shipwrecked travelers to use as slaves.



To save his young ward, Alix will infiltrate the city but end up captured. His relation with the city's queen will be ambiguous and tragic. She respects his courage and honesty and wishes him to act as her son's teacher; at the same time, she fears him because in a dream she saw he would doom her city. (At the same time, she suspects he may be the only one who can save her son should her dream proves true).





Alix is torn between his word to the queen and his responsibility to his ward and the other slaves of the city (most of them Roman citizens). When escaped slaves manage to bring back a Roman army to besiege the city, the slaves are marked for death and the die is cast; Alix leads a revolt.



The Spartans are no match for the invading army, but rather than be defeated, the queen and her guard prefer to perish with their city -after the queen asks Alix to see after her son.

This is drama with a capital D, here. Wagnerian stuff.





The series was adapted as a TV cartoon, with fairly faithful adaptations. I'm afraid however that there's no way a typical TV animation can do justice to Martin's lush and expansive decors.

A great series, well worth reading.

Lucky Luke


The comic-book world has its famous creators, and then it has its gods... the creators who were so amazingly good that they changed the way comics were made for one or more generations. The kind of people who eventually have a prize named after them. In the US, they are the Kirbys, the Eisners, the Fosters...

One such creator in France was René Goscinny, who among other things was the co-creator of Asterix with artist Albert Uderzo.

Goscinny was a very, very funny man. A very cultivated one too, but not one to flaunt his culture as an esthete snob; he was one to revel in the sheer fun of it. Hence the brilliance of Asterix, which can be read at many levels and be as much fun for adults as it is for kids.

Goscinny was the driving force behind the journal Pilote, where strips such as Lt. Blueberry and Valérian would push the limit of what a comic-strip was supposed to be like.

While he did not create Lucky Luke, he certainly hepled make it the sucess it is still today.

Lucky Luke was created by Maurice de Bevère, better known as Morris, in 1946. Morris was a big fan of American animation, which is obvious in his early art. He lived for a while in the US where he met Harvey Kurtzmann, and was there when MAD was born.



The early adventures of Lucky Luke, "the man who shoots faster than his own shadow", were aimed at a very young audience. The very first were very much in the tradition of Popeye or Disney, with a dynamic visual humor and simple backgrounds.

The series would take a brief detour in a more serious direction for a few books, but returned to humor with the arrival of Goscinny in 1955. And a damn funny book it became, in the Asterix tradition (only in the old west).

The premise is simple: Lucky Luke is a poor lonesome cowboy, and he travels the west catching crooks and highwaymen and basically exploring western folklore. He would meet such characters as Jesse James, Billy the kid, Black Bart, emperor Smith, judge Roy Bean... and of course his recurrent nemese, the Daltons. He would be there for the Oklahoma rush, for the discovery of oil in Texas, for the race between the two railroad companies that tried to cross the country... Lots of history to cover in those old U.S. of A.!

The Daltons are Lucky Luke's perennial opponents. Well, opponents... they are such incompetent criminals that they never manage to do anything too threatening. But when they escape from jail, they have to be caught and brought back!

In the image below, Averell Dalton is told by his brother to stop cleaning his ear with his six-shooter because it's really bad manners.



And one thing this comic-book series has certainly done in France is to get everyone to know this particular song, as it concludes every story!