Tintin, le journal des jeunes de 7 à 77 ans

Here's a sample of what could be found in issue #15 of the 30th year of the weekly journal Tintin. It's a fair cross-section of what was happening in 1975 at the Éditions du Lombard, a Belgian powerhouse when it came to comics. Weekly comics such as Tintin were a springboard for new stories, which were then collected in albums if judged popular enough. Dupuis had the same set-up with the weekly Spirou and Dargaud with the journal Pilote.

All of these journals offered a mix of adventure and humor strips. I'd say that Spirou aimed at an audience that was ever so slightly younger than Tintin, which in turn aimed at one slightly younger than Pilote. (That trend would become more apparent in the late 70s when Pilote started featuring more and more R-rated content).

So, back to this issue of Tintin. This issue starts with the begining of a new Bernard Prince adventure, who is appropriately featured on the cover. Prince is a standard adventurer whose sole reason to be is to give the authors the opportunity to craft adventure yarns set in exotic locales. He used to be some kind of cop in his early days, but later on became the owner of a small boat with which he travels the world delivering what must be extremely small cargoes, considering the diminutive size of the boat.

Prince is accompanied by a Captain Haddock-like sidekick, a red-headed and bearded sailor with a rotten temper and a heart of gold, as well as a serious drinking problem. With them is also a young orphan and a cub bear, both rescued in previous adventures. Bernard Prince will, in time, be embroiled in South American and African revolutions, drug traffic in northern Canada, an escape from a volcanic eruption in the southern seas, and a cleverly-mounted murder attempt in France. (The voyage aspect works, that's for sure).

The script is by Greg, creator of countless quality series and ex-editor in chief of Tintin; the art is by a young Hermann who would later be known in the US as the author of Jeremiah.



Even today I am impressed by the amount of detail Hermann puts in his work, and by the lightness and freedom of his brush work.

Modeste & Pompon follow in a one-pager. These characters were handled by many different authors over the years, and they never quite developed a real personality. Here, the strip would work the same way even if it wasn't part of a series. Artist Griffo is clearly influenced by Franquin, and shows that he's quite a capable cartoonist. (The joke is kind of dated, but hey... that's from 35 years ago...)



Buddy Longway was in its early days as a series, as this is the end of only his third adventure. Longway is the creation of Swiss writer-artist Derib, who had a passion for drawing horses and the American west. This series would become one of the most beloved of its time, earning numerous prizes for its realistic, humanist treatment of history. It's also interesting in that it did not have a status quo that's returned to again and again; the series progressed in time just as real life does (if not necessarily in real-time). We saw Buddy Longway fall in love and marry a young Lakota, Chinook. They built a cabin and had a boy; they faced some hostile natives, some nasty white men, some cruel military officers; they also met a lot of good people from both sides of the cultural divide. They went through life, basically, as a normal family would in such conditions. Their adult son later joined an Indian rebellion and was killed; and Buddy and Chinook, tragically, finally died in a very realistic anti-climax at the hand of a violent brute with whom they had had problems in the past and who, typically, had to blame someone for his self-inflicted problems. Despite this depressing ending, this was by all accounts a great series.

Here, still in the early days, Buddy and Chinook's cabin was taken over during the winter by three bandits. The family was made to work for the trio, until a falling-out caused the death of on of the crooks, and the other two left -taking the boy with them as a hostage. Buddy went after them, but so did a surprising ally : a wolf that the Longways had adopted as a cub, and who had a little while before gone back to a wild pack. As in any good Disney movie, the faithful animal had not forgotten his young friend.

Bruno Brazil is basically "Mission impossible" in comic-book form, written by the omnipresent Greg and drawn by the excellent William Vance. Vance is of course well-known today for his series XIII, but to me he'll always be forst and foremost the defining artist of Bob Morane.

In this story, "A storm over the Aleutians", Brazil and his group infiltrate a gang of crooks who smuggle illegal Chinese immigrants into the US, with a sinister purpose : they kill many of their customers before they reach the mainland, and fill the corpses with drugs.




Now THAT's a well-drawn boat!


Cosey's Jonathan is still in his first story in this issue. Jonathan is another prize-gathering series; if the Dalai Lama reads only one comic-book series, it's probably this one.

It starts as the quest of a young Swiss guy who tries to regain his memory; all he knows is that he's been in Tibet before. He journeys there and finds a tribe of Khambas who had known him before; he then slowly remembers what happened to him. Jonathan, in Switzerland, had met a young Khamba refugee and fallen in love with her; when she went back to her country as a young adult he had followed her. During a Chinese military operation in Tibet, they both had been victims of a bombing raid and the girl had died, while Jonathan was severely concussed.

Later episodes would mostly be set in Tibet and Nepal, and go from poetic plots to human drama. It's a very sensitive series, culturally-wise, and avoids the pitfalls of pitting "Good" Tibetans against "Evil" Chinese, while never excusing imperialism.






Chevalier Ardent is a medieval series by François Craenhals. It's main strength is in its historical verisimilitude, and in its frequent upsetting of the status quo.

In this story, Ardent, who is your typical headstrong young knight, has been deprived of his rank and castle by the king, who though he had eloped with his daughter. Furious, the young knight swears revenge on his former liege. (Here, he prepares to gain leadership of a band of robbers).

Corto Maltese the Ballad of the Salt Sea is available in English. I know it is one of Shaxper's favorites and based on his recommendations earlier this year, I had our local library order it and read it. It was amazing. IDW recently announced they are doing a new edition of it in English to launch a new line of European translations into English that I will be watching closely. I intend on picking up the new Corto Maltese edition to add to my shelves certainly, and will see what else they do that looks interesting.

-M

There was a lot of bad press about the production values of the last big Corto Maltese push into N America. I have that volume of Ballad of the Salt Sea, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But it was my first time really experiencing Pratt beyond a few isolated pages. I guess there were panels repositioned and omitted and pages completely reconfigured to work within the format. IDW's translations are supposed to be 100% faithful, so I can't wait to get my hands on them.

Thanks. I must admit that both Gypsy and Raptors are memorable to me mostly because of Marini's artwork. I did like one of the female villains in Gypsy; forget her name, but I found her more interesting than the title character himself! Raptors, I've only read the 3rd volume, so I never really got a handle on the story or the characters. Once aging, though, such gorgeous artwork from Marini.

(sorry, still haven't figured out the multi-quote function). I really like the concept behind this one and the realistic art looks beautiful.

What happened to the other European comics thread - wasn't it merged into this one? I was looking for something the other day that I think was posted there - a recommendation of where to start with Franka, or a description of how and when in the series the artist's style changed, or something like that.

They hadn't been merged, as you found, but they should have been, so upon seeing your note, I did merge them. Thanks for the heads up. I am fascinated by European comics, but both threads served essentially the same purpose-to highlight European stuff we may not have seen before, so I combined them.

-M

Moordende COncurrentie is the one.