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: 1948: 1949: 1950: 1951:
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.
>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.’
Aw yeah, the series is getting good now.
God bless ya, user.
>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.
>‘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 ...
>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.’
>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.
>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.
At this point the series took another month-long break, before returning in May with a new story, premiering with 5 pages.
>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.
I love when assholes try intimidating Luke.
Hahah
