Lucky Luke
The lonely cowboy has been riding through the Wild West for 75 years
Lucky Luke with his faithful companion Jolly Jumper. The horse has been around since the first comic in 1946.
© United Archives / IFTN / Picture Alliance
The first German Lucky Luke volume was published 75 years ago by Egmont Ehapa Verlag. The comic series has always dealt critically with its own topic and inspires its fans in this way to this day.
He is the most notorious hero in the Wild West: Lucky Luke shoots faster than his shadow and remains calm at the sight of the biggest villains. On Sunday, the Egmont Ehapa publishing house, which publishes the Lucky Luke comics in Germany, is celebrating the western hero’s 75th birthday. For decades the “lonely cowboy” has been riding through the USA and catching crooks.
Illustrator Morris first drew his cowboy in 1946
When the Belgian draftsman Morris first published a Lucky Luke comic in “Spirou” magazine on October 10, 1946, it looked a little different. There is still no black quiff peeping out from under the hat with its sweeping brim and Lucky Luke’s face is much rounder than it will be in later drawings. He’s already wearing a red scarf and a vest over a yellow shirt.
The longer version of the story “Arizona 1880” will appear on December 7th in the “Almanach Spirou 1947”. That’s why comic fans don’t quite agree on whether their hero’s birthday is in October or December.
From the beginning he is accompanied by his horse Jolly Jumper, who has to save him from dangerous situations again and again. Later, the four Dalton brothers with the same angular chin and different heights are added, who want to make life difficult for him. The prison dog Rantanplan is also always there.
Lucky Luke achieves worldwide success
Maurice de Bévère, as Morris is actually called, designed the first ten albums alone. Until he met the later Asterix author René Goscinny in New York during a stay of several years in the USA. The two worked together from 1955 and Goscinny played a key role in making the comic book cowboy a success.
In German, it is thanks to the translator Gudrun Penndorf that Lucky Luke is so quick-witted. For the publisher Egmont Ehapa she translated more than 60 volumes by Lucky Luke as well as many Asterix volumes. For this she received the German Youth Literature Prize in the category Special Prize for Complete Works in Translation this October.
When Goscinny died in 1977, Morris worked with other writers. As befits a comic book hero, Lucky Luke doesn’t age, but he does change. In 1983, Morris replaced the cigarette that had hung between his lips for decades with a blade of grass. The illustrator was awarded a medal for this by the World Health Organization (WHO) five years later.
In 2001 Morris died in Brussels at the age of 77. He leaves a total of 87 volumes by Lucky Luke that have been translated into more than 30 languages. The Frenchman Achdé continues the success story. And as Lucky Luke gets older, it’s time for modernization.
Modernization is advancing
After all, this is a nice cowboy who gets on well with the Native Americans and mediates between them and white soldiers. But cowboys were part of the white settlers who displaced and killed indigenous people.
In order to bring the history of the USA around slavery and racism into Lucky Luke’s adventure, Achdé and the French author Jul created a leading role for an African American for the first time last year. In addition to Lucky Luke, the sheriff Bass Reeves has his finger on the trigger and together they fight against the Ku Klux Klan.
The 75th birthday of the comic hero has now inspired other comic artists such as Ralf König to come up with their own interpretations. And so the cowboy will probably ride through the prairie for a while.
See in the video: Canadian tattoo artist Phil Berge stabbed over 70 people for an animation clip. He was inspired by the comic films of “Betty Boop”.