Lucky Luke's birthday | When people moo, Lucky Luke has to keep riding

What Lucky Luke doesn't like: being sanctified and having to dream of grasshoppers Photo: Egmont Verlag Lucky Luke is turning 80 and the end of the world is near. Right at the beginning of “Holy Lucky,” the new issue, the world's most famous comic cowboy is stopped on the Kansas prairie by an old man not to ride any further. “The world ends over there,” he shouts, pointing to the horizon where the sun is setting. "I don't want to see you fall into the abyss." Luke, on the other hand, suspects Nebraska is back there. But the man snaps at him: "Don't tell me you believe the nonsense of the government in Washington, which wants us to believe that the earth is round... just so we can pay more taxes!"

This sets the tone for Lucky Luke's 88th adventure. It's about faith, misunderstandings, hope, also called religion, right down to the quack and twisted ramifications. The focus is on Luke himself, who is proclaimed a kind of Jesus after he prevented robbers from stealing a church treasure and was also able to avert a plague of locusts by shooting the insects out of the sky. In a dark church, the light falls on him from above like a figure of a saint, while the priest tells him that he senses how "Lucism" is turning the Wild West upside down, because: "Luke, now you're famous... but soon you'll become a cult!" When the new prophet explains to a crowd that he's just a cowboy whose job it is to herd cows, a woman tells him: "You're our cowboy" and then shouts into the crowd: "And we are his herd of cattle!” Then everyone starts mooing like cows.

What awaits on the horizon can be anything, from great happiness to the “end of the world”.

To celebrate the 80th birthday of the most famous French comic character after Asterix, jokes about “Lucism” are of course a nice gesture. When the new volume was presented in Berlin at the Belgian embassy last week, its team of authors, consisting of the illustrator Achdé and the copywriter Jul, made a few jokes about the "miracles" this volume could bring about - after they showed it to Pope Leo XIV when he recently traveled to France. Achdé, who is not so slim, can now feel thinner and Jul's daughter is now doing better at school. What Lucky Luke himself believes in remains unclear, however, just as he is about to say "I believe..." in the new issue, he is interrupted. A poker player had previously told him: “In the Wild West you can lose your money in a lot of stupid ways. The religion is definitely the most boring." But it is not without danger: later Luke, who is known to shoot faster than his shadow, notices that he has no cartridges in his revolver because they were stolen from him to display as relics of "Lucism" in the church.

In an interview with "Welt am Sonntag", which a week ago dedicated an entire issue to the current celebrations of "Lukism", Jul explained: "The brilliant thing is that with Lucky Luke we have not known his sexuality for 80 years or really know why he has all these abilities. And of course we don't want to know what he believes in either. We prefer to keep these ambiguities because that way everyone can project whatever they want into this character.«

It has been noted on several occasions that the "vastness" of the "Wild West" into which Lucky Luke rides sets this comic apart from others, both graphically and imaginatively. What awaits on the horizon can be anything, from great happiness to the “end of the world”. Historically, the “Wild West” in the 19th century was “the development space of a wolfish, uncontrolled capitalism,” as Georg Seeßlen states in his book “Lucky Luke,” published in 2023. People and landscapes have been subjugated, which leads to a melancholic insight into the limited moral resources of the western heroes in films, books and comics. Things weren’t much different for the private detectives in the “Black Series” crime novels. For Seeßlen, the “right-wing western hero” is part of the “conquest” of the “West” and the “left-wing western hero” is part of the “escape from it”; mixed forms can usually be found. "Nowhere does this saying have such a beautiful and at the same time such a cruel meaning: This is a free country."

Lucky Luke tends to be a “left-wing Western hero.” According to Jul, he has “fundamental, universal values ​​– justice, tolerance, protection of the weak, rejection of unnecessary violence. At the same time he also has doubts. He is not a monolithic figure, but a rather fluid one” – and that is why he is not a protective, immobile conservative. To Seeßlen he appears as "an outsider on his own account"; for him and his horse Jolly Jumper, "true happiness can only consist in movement." That's why in the final image of each episode he sings his famous song "I'm a poor lonesome cowboy, and a long way from home...". In the new issue he even sings it at the beginning, while at the end his horse Jolly makes “Moo” to annoy him. No, religion is not her thing.

Lucky Luke was invented in 1946 by the Belgian Maurice De Bevere, who called himself Morris. Graphically, he based himself on the sober "clear line" that Hergé had introduced a decade and a half earlier with "Tintin" and thus ensured concrete, clear pictorial spaces without a lot of frills. For Seeßlen, Luke's adventures are an attempt to "find a clear line that adapts to the circumstances." His opponents, obscure figures and gangs form “a counter-line at a 90-degree angle. So they always want to set up a border against the movement, which is always bound to go wrong. Lucky Luke is the guy who literally pulls the line, whatever curves are required." In "Holy Lucky" he stands with Jolly Jumper in front of two signs that point in opposite directions, to the two places where he is venerated as a new saint. They are called “Faith” and “Beliefs Junction”. In the style of a navigation device, Jolly Jumper says: “Tell your horse the preferred route.”

Luke's rise to fame was originally a parallel movement to the rise of western films in Hollywood, which ended in the 1960s when new ideas of freedom began to circulate (music, drugs, education). But Luke stayed in the saddle. If necessary, he even rides a bike.

His fame began in the 1950s, fueled by René Goscinny, who came up with the stories and, as a former illustrator, planned the sequence of images like a kind of script. At the same time, he did the same for the “Asterix” booklets, which he developed with Albert Uderzo. Seeßlen writes that Goscinny “actually invented the profession of a modern comic scenarist” – with resounding success after a long dry spell. Because both he and Morris had failed as artists once in the USA. They actually wanted to go to the Disney studios and the publisher of “Superman,” but they were rejected as too bad. They were only allowed to color children's books, a secondary activity through which they got to know each other. Goscinny then went to Brussels, but Morris stayed in the USA longer and made many sketches of the landscape, which were then incorporated into the Lucky Luke stories. But the joke came from Goscinny, in which he incorporated and reworked various historical Western themes (railway construction, Daltons, Jesse James, gold diggers, telegraph construction).

These stories originally appeared as serials in comic magazines such as the Belgian "Spirou" and the French "Pilote", and in West Germany in the legendary "Zack", which was read almost exclusively by children, who were able to read today's comic classics of the adult world such as "Michel Vaillant", "Valerian and Veronique" or "Leutnant Blueberry". In this very serious company, Lucky Luke was one of the funnies.

When Goscinny died in 1977, Morris, unlike Uderzo, did not continue with “Asterix” alone, but instead looked for new lyricists. Luckily, while Uderzo's stories became more and more stupid, Lucky Luke remained interesting. Still, Morris said Goscinny's death was like losing his hand. He died in 2001, but had stipulated in his will that the series should continue. Since then, the Frenchman Achdé (Hervé Darmenton) has been drawing the series, for ten years together with Jul (Julien Berjeaut) as a scenarist, who also draws himself, for example the successful series "Silex and the City", a kind of educated middle-class update of "The Feuerstein Family".

Lucky Luke's best friend is Jolly Jumper. A horse that speaks - or rather: thinks, because the cowboy doesn't hear him. It can also read and write. In “Holy Lucky” she forges a pass that allows both of them to escape from the religious madness. The Belgian embassy asked about the division of labor between Achdé and Jul. They said one was always the horse - but they took turns.

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