Classic | “Life sucks,” says Nestor Burma

There is also a lot to do underwater for Andy Morgan. Photo: Hermann / Avant-Verlag How did scandals arise in the 1960s? The comic series “Jugurtha,” launched in 1967 by the journalist Jean-Luc Vernal and the illustrator Hermann Huppen – who worked under the pen name Hermann until his death in 2026 – quickly developed into one. Not because of the story itself, which tells of Jugurhta, the prince of Numidia, who around 100 BC challenged the Roman occupying power, which also had the area that is now Algeria under its control.

Rather, the criticism was sparked by the parallels to the Algerian war, which had claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and had only ended five years earlier with the independence of the former French colony. The fact that two authors rehearsed the uprising from the perspective of the oppressed, and in the medium of a comic, enraged conservative war nostalgics. And it made clear that Hermann, who was born in Belgium in 1938, saw comics as a political medium that could be used to criticize society and also to draw a line against the spirit of the times.

Such a perspective against the spirit of the times also shaped his best-known series, "Andy Morgan", alongside the western series "Comanche", which he developed at the end of the sixties together with the scenarist Greg (Michel Régnier) as a serial comic for the magazine "Tintin" and which has been republished in a new edition by Berlin's avant-verlag since this year; in large format and a color and a black and white edition.

Former Interpol inspector Andy Morgan began his career as a classic comic hero who uses cleverness and fists to eliminate his opponents. When the two authors were given more space, the protagonist also broke away from his stereotypes with the formal freedom and traveled around the world for many adventures on the yacht "Cormoran" together with his friend and experienced sailor Barney Jordan and his foster son Ali, where they became involved in adventures that usually had to do with corrupt landowners or brutal dictators oppressing and harassing the common people. Andy always takes the side of the oppressed, but - for example in the album "Oasis in Flames", which is included in the first volume of the work edition - stays in the background and leaves the battlefield to Barney Jordan.

Somewhere in North Africa they become involved in a civil war when, on behalf of the World Relief Organization, they are supposed to bring medicine to victims of the fighting. “Wherever people suffer due to political conflicts, we intervene,” their client Fergus MacPherson explained the mission to them. In detailed, dynamic drawings, a battle between good and evil is opened, in which humanity ultimately triumphs over the power-hungry and unscrupulous.

»The belief that certain aspects of history are repeating themselves is increasingly depressing me.«

In this man's world, women have a clearly defined place; they can be victims, dressed as lightly as possible, or seductresses. But beyond the clichés, the series shows that despite everything, it was possible to design heroes even against the spirit of the times, because Andy Morgan does not seem quite as confident as James Bond or other contemporaries in the first two adventures collected as part of the work edition. He narrowly escapes death, has to be saved himself, cares sacrificially for his foster son Ali and always remains respectfully distant from the female characters.

This presents an at least slightly cracked masculinity in the fight against the toxic masculinity of dictators, drug lords and demagogues. This connects Andy Morgan with the former French secret agent Max Friedman, a figure created by the Italian illustrator Vittorio Giardini, born in 1946, who is also ennobled with a complete edition by the publisher Salleck Publications. The “Jewish James Bond” was developed by Giardini in 1982 and set in the period shortly before the Second World War, where the single father and tobacconist, who has settled in Geneva, is forced by his former employers to set off for Hungary in 1938 in order to investigate the systematic murder of French secret agents. He finds himself targeted by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators as he feels increasingly threatened as a Jew and Europe prepares for the outbreak of war; The first adventure, “Hungarian Rhapsody,” ends with the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany.

Even the calm Friedman does not correspond to the image that one would initially associate with a comic hero. Although he maintains sexual relationships with women - who, by the way, play a very active role in the comic as a whole and can often be found with a drawn weapon on one side of the political spectrum or the other - his sad eyes always look worriedly at the safety of his daughter, given the brutality of the time, which even a Jewish James Bond cannot stop. In an interview included in the complete edition, the illustrator Giardini explains when asked what a comic like “Max Friedman” can say about the present: “The conviction that certain aspects of history are repeating themselves is increasingly depressing me.”

At a similar time to Max Friedman, Léo Malet brought his private investigator Nestor Burma into the world. In the early 1940s, Burma experienced its first adventure in Paris under German occupation with “120, Rue de la Gare,” which was also closely linked to everyday life under the Nazi regime. The illustrator Tardi has translated four Burma crime novels into comics, and further adaptations have been made by other illustrators, especially Emmanuel Moynot, as is the case with the volume “Nestor Burma in der Klemme”, currently published in German by Schreiber & Leser. This early work in the Burma series, created in 1945, is set in 1942 and shows a country in a state of emergency.

The private investigator has just been released from captivity, is exposed to air raids on Paris and stumbles across a mysterious woman and a corpse in the criminal case involving a bank robbery. The Tardi-like drawings capture the oppressive atmosphere of occupied Paris as well as the protagonist's identity, shaken by captivity, war and occupation, which he can only adequately hide behind a façade of machismo and arrogance. Shortly afterwards, Malet wrote the first volume of his "Black Trilogy" with the title "Life Sucks", in which he provided his broken hero Nestor Burma with an anti-hero as a mirror image who, with an anarchist committee, commits attacks for striking miners and slides further and further into crime.

Andy Morgan, Max Friedman and Nestor Burma are three heroic anti-heroes who struggle with their masculinity, despair of the realities of their time and use all their remaining strength to make the world a better place.

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