It's time to take a look at the 1952 era of Lucky Luke, one of Europe's biggest comic successes, annotated with interviews and other commentary taken from Lucky Luke the Complete Collection. Once again, comments are very welcome, especially if this stuff is all new to you.Previous threads:1946/7: >>1147626751948: >>1147892201949: >>1148125701950: >>1148365901951: >>114882034
LUCKY LUKE YEAR SIX ANNOTATED STORYTIME
Ryan Russell
Gabriel Hill
When we last left Lucky Luke, he had just arrested the Daltons, but they made their immediate escape. Let's pick up the story from there.
Austin Edwards
>Beyond the stupidity and nastiness of his characters, which were obviously exaggerated compared to their real-life models, Morris also took a few other liberties. ‘I quickly realised,’ he remembered, ‘that what I was reading was a bizarre mix of legend and historical reality and that telling them apart was almost impossible. So, I turned them into four brothers who acted together, when in fact Bill Dalton only turned bad after the other three were out of the picture. I found it funnier and more effective to have all four together.’
Lucas Robinson
Luke Williams
William Flores
Lincoln Russell
Isaiah Young
Aw yeah, the series is getting good now.
Elijah Edwards
Nolan Thomas
Jack Stewart
Hunter Wilson
Charles Bell
>>114908715God bless ya, user.
Anthony Thomas
Alexander Richardson
Robert Rivera
>Though Outlaws did depict a few of the gang’s evil deeds, it was mostly an excuse to laugh at them. All the way to the conclusion — loosely based on the Coffeyville attack that ended in the deaths of three of its members — Morris repeatedly showcased the dim-wittedness of his quartet.
Austin Diaz
>‘That double hold-up brought their pathetic exploits to an end,’ he explained. ‘It’s a textbook example. They’d decided to attack two banks at the same time, but, unable to tie their horses in front of their targets, they left them at the back of a cul-de-sac! Then the bank’s cashier managed to gain precious time by convincing the gullible Daltons — who were wearing ridiculous fake beards — that the safe was on a time lock and couldn’t be opened before 9:15 am ...
Adrian Edwards
>As for the loot, the cashier at the Condon Bank was only missing 20 dollars when he checked after the attack; meanwhile, the tally at the First National Bank inexplicably came up with an excess $1.98.76 So, the death of my Daltons was told as it happened in history ... while making it as comedic as possible.’
Connor Wright
>But at the time, the Committee in Charge of Surveillance and Control over Publications Aimed at Children and Adolescents reigned supreme, and death and humour were not considered a proper match in youth comics. That French government agency was tasked with enforcing the Law of July 16, 1949, on Publications Aimed at Youth. While nominally the law was put in place to ensure the morality of children’s reading material imported into France, its hidden goal was to protect the national market and promote local creations. Le Journal de Spirou, being Belgian, was a regular target and often had to modify the content of its strips in order to be authorised for importation. As the end of Outlaws depicted the death of Bob Dalton in rather explicit fashion, publisher Charles Dupuis was worried the story would be banned entirely and asked Morris to tone down the blood-soaked final scene to make it more palatable to censors.
James Nelson
>Thus, the last page of the episode was modified by its author, and the smallest of the Daltons was merely captured by Lucky Luke. A veil was drawn over the demise of the gang, summed up in a single image of a graveyard and a couple of moralistic narrative lines: ‘And so ended the story of the Dalton Brothers. The recklessness that had made them so dangerous eventually led them to where they’d sent so many before ...’ At that moment, of course, Morris didn’t know that his characters would delight readers so much that they’d be clamouring for them to return, even from the grave. ‘I didn’t have the feeling I was making a mistake when I killed them,’ he recalled, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. It was mostly to get that touch of authenticity — and for the pleasure of drawing those four graves at the end.’ Nonetheless Morris, who enjoyed a measure of dark humour, would always regret having to modify the smallest Dalton’s death scene, to the point that he would eventually restore it in another edition of the episode as part of the ‘Gags de poche’ (Pocket Gags) collection some ten years later. ‘Before the appearance of that certificate from the censor for youth publications in France, Lucky Luke had killed a handful of bandits. But he couldn’t do so any more, which was a source of added difficulty, actually: an entirely bloodless Western isn’t an easy tale to tell! Later on, the publisher asked me to make him a paragon of nobility, justice, and morals, to avoid heavy financial losses in case an album ended up being banned. You can’t defeat commercial imperatives!’ Morris wasn’t treading unknown territory, though. His American colleagues had to deal with a somewhat similar form of censorship, the Comics Code, and they no doubt helped him find ways to avoid falling foul of the politically correct injunctions afflicting both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Brandon Gomez
At this point the series took another month-long break, before returning in May with a new story, premiering with 5 pages.
Jaxon Brown
>Now done with the Daltons, Morris started on a sequel to Clean-up in Red City called Rough and Tumble in Tumbleweed, which saw the return of Pat Poker. In order to reach the required sized for a regular album, he had to add several short stories of a few pages each - as well as draw new panels to replace the title panels that introduced each page as it was published in the magazine. To keep a certain thematic coherence, therefore, the volume Lucky Luke Versus Pat Poker would be made up of two stories starring the eponymous gambler, while Outlaws would also contain two stories but about the Daltons.
Jack Richardson
Leo Cook
Josiah Perez
Alexander Johnson
Kayden Smith
I love when assholes try intimidating Luke.
Julian Baker
Austin Clark
Alexander Collins
Jackson Collins
Kayden Perry
Anthony Garcia
John Hall
>>114909488Hahah
Isaac Brown
Jaxon Diaz
Henry Cox
Robert Anderson
Now the "recipe" is only missing the dumb dog and talking jolly jumper.
Jackson Myers
Zachary Howard
>>114909661We got talking Jolly already >>114763600
Ethan Wilson
Con-sarn-it!! This shit is really good. I used to see Lucky Luke translations in an international bookstore when I was growing up. I ignored them. Now I’ve gotta track some of these things down. It’s stuff like this and other Euro and non-mainstream comics that are why I check into Holla Forums.
Andrew Cooper
Xavier Gonzalez
>>114909701We still haven't reached the point where the series gets really good yet. That happens once Goscinny starts scripting.
Andrew Nguyen
Ethan Powell
Aaron Thomas
Mason Hill
>>114909680Luke is such a dick
Jayden Scott
Liam Edwards
Brandon Mitchell
Dominic Baker
Julian Campbell
And another story comes to an end.
Dylan Cooper
>The second one of these, Return of the Dalton Brothers, evidently didn’t resurrect the four bandits but instead presented a fake return, with a gang disguised as the Daltons, demonstrating Morris’s fondness for his creations.
Blake Hernandez
>>114909951Nice callback to when he cheated at solitaire in his last story.
Julian Harris
>For now, though, the news coming from Belgium was bad, as he was informed that his father had passed away in June 1952. He returned to Courtrai immediately to be with his family, something he hadn’t done in nearly four years. The first person he met coming off the plane was a colleague, Albert Uderzo, whose name he’d barely even heard: ‘Goscinny had asked me to go and fetch him from the airport in Paris,’ remembered Asterix’s co-creator. ‘Back then I had a Citroén Traction Avant — the preferred car of Fr my vehicle up and down and goes, “You still have cars like this here?” Not a good start! Then we stopped at my office at the World, where I showed him my drawings. I remember his disdainful tone vividly: “It’s very Disneyish ...” which must have been derogatory to him. That’s how he was. He could have quite the sharp tongue about a colleague’s art. Fortunately we got to know and like each other eventually. He was someone I adored, even, despite that cold side. I don’t know if it was because of his Flemish origins, but he could be remarkably straightforward sometimes, uncompromising.’
Gavin Mitchell
>Uderzo, who (fortunately) wasn’t easily offended, took Morris to the Gare du Nord station, where the latter took the train to Brussels first, then to Courtrai. There he would stay for about ten weeks, during which he met with his publisher again, signing a contract for a fourth Lucky Luke volume, Under a Western Sky, with a marked increase in print numbers (50,000 in French, 7,500 in Dutch).
Colton Miller
>It was also while he was in Courtrai at that time that he was reacquainted with a childhood friend, Francine Blanckaert, whose father was a local newspaper and magazine distributor who owned several bookstores and newsstands. ‘The first time we met was during some small party I barely remember,’ she confided. ‘We were just children then. We saw each other again in 1942 — he was 18 and a half, I was 17 —- and we were in the same merry gang of friends. We'd regularly meet up to ride our bikes and go and picnic somewhere. In winter, the parents of one of our friends would let us use a big room where we could spend time together, have a tea dance ... He was a university student, and, back then, I didn’t know a thing about his passion for drawing, his talent, or his plans. I wasn’t even told when he left for America. When he called me on the phone to give me the sad news about his father passing away, he also asked to see me again. We got engaged, and five months later we were married. That was the beginning of a gloriously happy life. We made a great team, with Lucky Luke on the mind!’
Jayden Cruz
>Morris’s life was in the US, so the couple shortly boarded a brand-new liner, the SS United States, and settled into his small bachelor apartment in New York. The wedding took place on 8 November 1952 at the Holy Trinity Church on Broadway and was the scene of a colourful anecdote: ‘I wanted Goscinny to be my best man,’ said Morris, ‘but on the day of the wedding the priest refused because he was Jewish. We didn’t know. So the priest grabbed the first Catholic he found in the street to serve as our best man. René said, “If it’s the rule, it’s the rule” The newlyweds then went to the famous Niagara Falls, where they were given a certificate to commemorate the honeymoon, along with good wishes for eternal marital bliss, symbolised by the water’s uninterrupted flow. Once back in New York, the couple discovered the American Way of Life. ‘Maurice’s bachelor pad was a very pleasant pied-a-terre in a posh neighbourhood,’ recalled his wife. ‘We had a sunny, warm, lavish living room, a tiny kitchenette, a small bathroom, and a room that served as a dressing room. At the entrance to the building, under an awning, at all times stood a doorman in white gloves who'd help us bring our luggage into the lobby. When I first set foot in that city, I felt crushed by the height of the buildings, overwhelmed by the blinking neon signs, the crowds, the cars, etc ... We didn’t quite live the American way, though. For example, I would cook unfamiliar vegetables the European way — there were a lot I didn’t know — preparing them simply, far from ketchup and pizzas — which were a new experience too.’
Thomas Fisher
>Even as he was introducing his wife to life in America — as well as to Lucky Luke, whom she’d never even heard of — Morris witnessed the birth of two magazines destined for wildly different futures. On one side, René Goscinny saw the work of a whole year finally bear fruit with the publication of the first issue of TV Family. On the other, Harvey Kurtzman launched a new humour comic, Mad, for which he was not only editorial manager and main writer but also the artist behind several covers. While Dupuis Publishing’s TV listings magazine rapidly collapsed under the protectionist onslaught of its American competitors, Mad would make a marked impact on the history of comics worldwide, thanks to unprecedented outspokenness and self-derision. That off-the-wall humour had a profound influence on Morris and Goscinny and contributed to the considerable evolution of the tone of Lucky Luke’s adventures, especially when the latter was given the task of writing the scripts. ‘The first version of Mad was a comic book, in colour but printed on terribly low-quality paper,’ said Morris. ‘It was a collection of short parodies in different genres, sometimes Westerns, sometimes Sherlock Holmes-style crime stories, sometimes science fiction, etc ... I’m convinced I was deeply influenced by their lampooning of Westerns, because it was from that moment on that Lucky Luke became 100 percent parodic, where before he was merely a mostly humorous cowboy.’
Aaron Powell
Aaron Sanchez
Gavin Young
Jeremiah Hernandez
>Having just celebrated his 29th birthday, and now a brand-new husband, Morris completed the 258th page of Lucky Luke. His cowboy’s silhouette shed the last of its roundness, inherited from animated cartoons, to become increasingly slim and even reveal a few sharp features as the humour in his adventures became darker. After Pat Poker and the Daltons, the artist began brewing up new opponents worthy of his hero. A hero who, while he wasn’t yet calling himself a ‘lonesome cowboy’, was beginning to have a rather well-filled supporting cast, not to mention the growing number of notches on the grip of his Colt — all things that made Morris’s job all the harder. As Hitchcock would put it later, ‘the more successful the villain, the more successful the movie’, and De Bevere was already regretting having killed off those who probably had the right stuff to become his series’s ‘super-villains’. In the meantime, he read the latest parodies in Mad and found himself dreaming of new bandits as stupid as they were evil. After all, didn’t the first names of those American artists whose pages he found so interesting — John (Severin), Jack (Davies), William (Elder), and Harvey (Kurtzman) — sound suspiciously like an invitation to invent such characters?
Jacob Myers
This was the fourth Lucky Luke album, mentioned in >>114910085It was released in late 1952 and contained the last bits of pre-hiatus Lucky Luke - "Return of Trigger Joe" from 1949/'50, and "Round-Up Days" and "The Big Fight" from 1950
Justin Kelly
A new story then started the week after Return of the Dalton Brothers concluded, introducing a new major villain for Luke.
Hunter Wilson
Jace Baker
But since this is the last page from '52, we'll save the annotations for the 1953 thread. Join us tomorrow for the 1953 era of the strip and more Doc Doxey.
Tyler Cook
>>114910246>idn’t the first names of those American artists whose pages he found so interesting — John (Severin), Jack (Davies), William (Elder), and Harvey (Kurtzman) — sound suspiciously like an invitation to invent such characters?noice trivia
Zachary Turner
>>114910514Yeah, I'm learning lots of cool shit from these notes.
Logan Torres
>>114909162Damn, that's actually pretty bloody.
Sebastian Adams
Bump for quality thread.
Owen Lewis
>>114909190Wait wh-Oh wow.I did NOT know there was a previous incarnation of the Daltons.
Gavin Cooper
>>114911649These are the actual Daltons, based on the real life ones. Morris would later introduce their bungling cousins, who are the ones you know.
Noah Smith
>>114909375That the same Angelface as in Blueberry?
Owen Gutierrez
>>114910357Ohhh I remember this one from my childhood.
Brayden Sanchez
>>114911694The things you unexpectedly learn.
Hunter Gray
>>114910357This is a good one-
Nicholas Peterson
When does the dog show up?
Adrian Bailey
>>114913745Like the mid 60s.