As mentioned last week, I’ve been rereading the first decade of René Goscinny’s run on the Belgian series Lucky Luke, illustrated by Morris, and trying to figure out what made those comics work (and why they resonated so much with me when I was younger).
The Black Hills
On the one hand, the books were more comedies than proper parodies, as many of the character traits and situations were droll by themselves, without requiring deep referentiality. Moreover, instead of mocking recognizable narratives, if anything the plots seemed to pay tribute to them. The Wagon Train was a serviceable whodunit set in a caravan headed for California. The excellent The 20th Cavalry presented a tense escalation of conflict between the cavalry and the Cheyenne. In Calamity Jane, ostensibly separate A and B plots were masterly interwoven before simultaneously paying off at the end.
In fact, after a while, Goscinny’s plots became so elaborate that they sometimes worked almost as ‘pure’ westerns that happened to contain tongue-in-cheek gags. The result was not too dissimilar to films that, while not outright comedies, have a consciously playful vein running through them, such as Destry Rides Again, Ride a Crooked Trail, or Heller in Pink Tights. Hell, if you tone down the deadly violence, spaghetti westerns like Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin – not to mention They Call Me Trinity and its sequels – could practically pass as Lucky Luke entries.
Take The Black Hills, where Lucky Luke is tasked with escorting a scientific expedition into Wyoming in order to prepare the territory for settlement, basically taking over the land controlled by the Cheyenne (‘Let us proclaim that civilization must cross the Black Hills!’). It’s a boisterous adventure full of laughs and thrills, even if the hero is trying to push forward Western settler colonialism and the villains are seemingly trying to prevent it…
The Black Hills
To be fair, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, the senator you see opposing the expedition is just trying to safeguard his own shady business interests (‘He sold guns and alcohol to the Indians, and he was afraid that civilization would ruin his trade…’). Although you can say the Cheyenne, led by Chief Yellow Dog, start out infantilized (in a slightly different way than almost all Lucky Luke characters are infantilized, because playing on existing prejudices), the album makes it clear that a) the Cheyenne have been corrupted by greedy white capitalists, and b) they could ultimately excel at Western notions of institutionalized knowledge (it’s the book’s final punchline).
Rather than looking for a specific moral angle or ideological perspective, though, you can also just approach The Black Hills – and the rest of the series, really – as a whimsical retelling of brutal historical processes, with the primary joke being the very act of making light of them by having everyone involved coming across as utterly silly.
For instance, this is Lucky Luke’s version of North-American imperialism in Mexico:
Tortillas for the Daltons
That said, some of the humor comes down to sheer execution. If you go back to the second scan from The Black Hills, you’ll notice there is a droll progression in the first three panels, amusingly contrasting Lucky Luke’s horse, hat, and demeanor (symbolizing the Wild West) with Washington’s more formal, austere modernity.
You can find plenty of similar gags in the (sort of) sequel, The 20th Cavalry. There, Yellow Dog is once again tricked by a white guy into declaring war, but he’s not necessarily more foolish than anyone else:
The 20th Cavalry
The composition in these pages is just one of many examples where the team of Goscinny & Morris came up with effective visual techniques to deliver their jokes… For another example, check out how shifting panel lengths in the sequence below (from Joss Jamon’s Gang) provide the necessary timing and fluidity to sell an apparently simple gag:
Joss Jamon’s Gang
The scene doesn’t stop there. Having established the dynamic of the situation and the geography of the saloon, the page continues in a way that takes advantage of readers’ awareness of these two aspects in order to indirectly suggest what happens off-panel (thus letting us imagine the literal punchline):
Joss Jamon’s Gang
As you can tell by now, saloons are a major setting in Lucky Luke, so Morris’ varied mise-en-scène is also a way to prevent visual boredom…
Below you can find yet another example from Joss Jamon’s Gang, set in this same saloon, later on. It’s a sequence that really nails how thoughtful framing can elevate a joke. Basically, we’re dealing with a classic premise in which a large group of people all have the same reaction at the same time (with one comical exception). Once again, Morris pulls it off through the way he frames the action, underling the collective dimension:
Joss Jamon’s Gang
On the other hand (yep, I’m finally complementing the thought from the beginning of this post), some elements *were* deliberately satirical. For one thing, Lucky Luke painted the Old West through the broadest – and most unflattering – of brushstrokes, conjuring up a whole culture that seemed to largely revolve around stupid, venal men drinking, fighting, and pointlessly killing each other.
This was taken to a surrealist minimalistic extreme in The Escort:
The Escort
Such over-the-top exaggeration may be read as a mere satire of the western genre, itself prone to reduce the final decades of the 19th century to a limited amount of stock characters and tropes. But it’s also not too much of a stretch to find in the series a satire of America – or even of humanity in general, with its history of violent conflicts, especially over property.
Plenty of stories revolve around land disputes in one way or another. In one album, Lucky Luke sides with farmers against the local cattle breeders (even though he is ostensibly a cowboy himself) and the main source of ridicule is that, in such a heated dispute, putting up a barbed wire fence becomes tantamount to an act of war…
Barbed Wire on the Prairie
René Goscinny was certainly a politicized figure. In 1956, along with Charlier and Uderzo, he called upon Belgian artists to sign a charter to strengthen the professional status of comic creators. In retaliation, the three of them were fired by their publishers. They then created an independent company, Edipresse-Edifrance, and in 1959 founded the magazine Pilote. Named editor-in-chief in 1963, Goscinny changed the magazine’s target audience from children to teenagers – and you can see the same looser, rebellious spirit in his work on Lucky Luke (at the time still being published by the mainstream publisher Dupuis).
In both Joss Jamon’s Gang and The Judge, the criminals become institutionalized, so the (black) comedy derives from a caricature of corrupt, despotic authorities. Joss Jamon’s gang don’t just rob the bank – they take over the bank and, gradually, over every business in Frontier Town. Soon, Jamon decides to become Mayor (‘We’ll expand our empire over the whole state… and maybe, who knows, over the whole country…’), leading to this mockery of democracy:
Joss Jamon’s Gang
(The main joke is rampant authoritarianism, of course, but also the way Morris and Goscinny use the elliptical language of comics… the humor is not just in the situation itself, but in the abrupt transitions.)
One of the effects of the criminals’ rise to power is a curious inversion. Lucky Luke, who is often a straight man/authority figure, comes across in these albums as more of an anarchic Daffy Duck character, sabotaging the (criminal) state. Between the rigged elections, extortionary law enforcement, random arrests, and ridiculously shameless show trials, it’s hardly a stretch to see this as a satire, not just of predatory capitalism, but of the very rise of fascism (in the case of Joss Jamon’s Gang, with the Civil War as a stand-in for World War I). In that sense, Lucky Luke appears here as a force of resistance, ultimately mobilizing the people into carrying out a revolution against their oppressors. (The same goes for the album Billy the Kid, which at the end of the day is also an anti-tyranny parable.)
You get another comedic take on elections in The Oklahoma Land Rush, in which Lucky Luke is assigned with managing the land run of 1899, when settlers were authorized to take over the former Indian Territory. The main joke there, though, is how arbitrary property ownership is… It’s imposed by violence, yet people immediately feel a sense of entitlement:
The Oklahoma Land Rush
It’s a funny album that also takes potshots at familiar targets, like capitalist speculation, overexploitation of natural resources, and dizzying, out-of-control modernity, with urban institutions sprouting at lightning speed (apparently doing justice to the real-life Oklahoma City, which, according to the book’s back matter, within five weeks already had stores, a bank, a daily newspaper… and a graveyard).
And sure, once again, it’s tasteless – to say the least – to discard all the violence committed against the Native Americans killed or expelled from the land, reducing the whole process to a whimsical, friendly negotiation. At least The Oklahoma Land Rush unabashedly acknowledges that it’s a fantasy about a much more benign version of history. In the ironic ending, the real-world victims get the fictional last laugh:
The Oklahoma Land Rush
(If you’ve seen last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, though, you know this wasn’t a happy ending as much as a new chapter in the Osages’ tragic history…)
Oil digging would itself become the target of satire a few books later. In 1962’s In the Shadow of the Derricks, Lucky Luke gets appointed sheriff of Titusville, Pennsylvania, during a rush for oil in that town. His job is to bring order into a place where everyone has gone crazy with greed and is destroying the environment by digging for oil everywhere (and, yes, the worst of the lot is a law-savvy businessman exploiting the system and using all sorts of dirty tricks to build a monopoly). It’s a wonderfully caricatural album, conjuring up yet another amusingly surreal setting, conveyed by Morris’ cinematic framings:
In the Shadow of the Derricks