PARIS – A few years ago Julien Berjeaut was a cartoonist who emerged from a hit series when he received the rarest offer in the French-speaking world: to take on a classic comic book, Lucky Luke.
The story of a cowboy in the American Old West, Lucky Luke, was just one of a handful of comic book series that had been an integral part of growing up in France and other Francophone countries for generations. Children read Lucky Luke with Tintin and Astérix at their most impressive ages, when, as Mr Berjeaut said, the story “like a blow of a hammer enters the mind and never comes out”.
But while looking for new storylines, Mr. Berjeaut became troubled while pondering the presence of black characters in Lucky Luke. In the almost 80 albums that were published over seven decades, black characters only appeared in one story: “Going up the Mississippi” – drawn in typically racist images.
“I had never thought about it, and then I started questioning myself,” he said, including the reasons he never created black characters himself, and concluded that he was subconsciously avoiding an uncomfortable subject. “For the first time, I felt some kind of astonishment.”
The result of Mr. Berjeaut’s introspection was “A Cowboy in Tall Cotton,” which was published in French late last year and is now being published in English. His goal is to tell the story of Lucky Luke and recently freed black slaves on a plantation in Louisiana. The narrative and graphic details of the book would reinterpret the role of the cowboy hero and the portrayal of black characters in non-racist terms. For the first time there is a black hero.
“What is different about this Lucky Luke, and what makes it powerful, is that it breaks stereotypes within a classic series where black people were stereotyped,” said Daniel Couvreur, a Belgian journalist and comics expert. “It’s no longer about going up the Mississippi.” Things have changed, and in Lucky Luke they change too. “
Touching a classic and childhood memories is a grueling exercise even in the best of times. However, the new book sold in a heated national debate over race, police violence, and colonialism when sections of the French establishment criticized what it viewed as an America-inspired obsession with race. What amounted to an attempt to decolonize Lucky Luke caused angry reactions.
A right-wing magazine, L’Incorrect, accused the new book of “prostituting the lonely cowboy to the obsessions of the time” and “turning one of the main characters of Franco-Belgian comics and our childhood imaginations” into an illustration “as bloated by progressive doctrine as a Netflix series. ” Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing magazine advertised by President Emmanuel Macron, complained that the book’s white characters were “grotesquely ugly” and suffered from “gross stupidity and meanness.”
Even so, the book received generally good reviews and was the best-selling comic book last year – it sold nearly half a million copies. Some prominent black French hailed it as a significant cultural moment.
For Jean-Pascal Zadi, a film director whose parents immigrated from Ivory Coast, the book was a sign that France was moving, albeit slowly, “in the right direction”.
“France are the old lady who are trying their best and who have to adapt because things are changing too much around them,” said Zadi. “There are incredible movements going on, people feel free to talk, and despite everything, France has to go with the flow. France has no choice. “
Mr. Zadi, 40, said “A Tall Cotton Cowboy” was the first comic book he had read since childhood. He suddenly stopped reading the genre when his older sister brought home an edition of Tintin in the Congo one day three decades ago.
It was published as the second book in the Tintin series in 1931 and takes Tintin, a reporter, and his faithful dog Milou to a Belgian colony. In an apology from colonialism, Tintin is the voice of reason and enlightenment, while the Congolese are portrayed as childlike, uncivilized and lazy. Most black characters are drawn the same way, with exaggerated red lips and coal-black skin. Even Milou speaks better French.
The book has long been the subject of heated debates, even in the Congo itself, and has taken an unusual place in pop culture: “Tintin in the Congo”, still one of the bestsellers among children’s comics, also embodied the classic comic racist representation black characters in books.
Throughout the genre, black characters, if they showed up at all, were in the same racial form. In “Going up the Mississippi,” published in 1961, the black characters in the Lucky Luke book are drawn, who for the most part resemble each other, lying around, singing and sleeping at work. In Astérix, the only returning black character is a pirate named Baba who cannot pronounce his Rs. In an Astérix book that was only published in 2015, black characters are drawn “in the classic neo-colonial tradition”, according to L’Express magazine.
It’s not like nothing has never changed. In 1983 the branded cigarette between Lucky Luke’s lips was replaced by a blade of grass – under pressure from Hanna-Barbera, the American studio that turned the comic book into a cartoon.
Pierre Cras, a French historian and comic book expert, said the traditional portrayal of blacks as “wild” and “lazy” should justify the “civilizing mission” of colonialism in Africa. That enduring representation, even six decades after France’s former African colonies gained independence, reflected the psyche of a nation that has not yet fully grappled with its colonial past, Cras said.
“It’s extremely interesting that he managed to break free of it,” said Cras of Mr. Berjeaut’s work on “A Cowboy in High Cotton.”
Biyong Djehuty, 45, a cartoonist who grew up in Cameroon and Togo before immigrating to France as a teenager, said it wasn’t until he was an adult that he realized how the traditional portrayal of blacks had affected him.
When he started drawing his own comics, he only sketched white characters. It wasn’t until he discovered Black Panther, the black superhero in the Marvel Comics, and a story about the Zulu Emperor Shaka in his middle school library that things changed.
“Then I started making drawings of Africans overnight,” said Djehuty, who publishes comics himself with an emphasis on African history. “It must have passed out, but we identify with a character who looks like us.”
When Mr Berjeaut – who is 46 years old and bears the pseudonym Jul – pondered the lack of black characters in Lucky Luke, he turned to Tintin in the Congo, which he had not read for decades.
“It was terribly racist,” he said. “Blacks were ugly, stupid – dumber than children, as if they were some kind of animal. They are addressed as if they were idiots throughout the comic. You have the feelings of idiots. “
And so Mr. Berjeaut said in “A cowboy in high cotton” – the intrigue takes place in a cotton plantation that Lucky Luke inherits during the reconstruction – he wanted to create the “antidote” against “Tintin in the Congo”.
By most accounts, he did – although in an American context it has always made it easier for the French to talk about race and racism. When the French government and leading intellectuals recently denounced the influence of American ideas on race as a threat to national unity, the story of a plantation in Louisiana became a source of reflection for Mr. Berjeaut.
“While I was working on the US, I was thinking about Europe and France,” he said. “It was like a kind of mirror. This history of slavery is also our history, albeit different. This story of racism is also our story, albeit different. “
Mr. Berjeaut, who studied history and anthropology at some of the best universities in France and taught history before becoming a cartoonist, delved into books on the Old West. He also met French scholars and activists to discuss the representation of blacks in pop culture.
For the first time in a comic book classic, black characters play full-fledged roles that match those of white characters. A black man – based on Bass Reeves, the first deputy black US marshal west of the Mississippi – appears as a hero alongside Lucky Luke himself.
Reeves and a hurricane prevent Lucky Luke from becoming a “white savior” – a trope that Mr. Berjeaut became aware of during his research. Lucky Luke, the legendary cowboy, also seems less sure of himself in a changing society.
Mr Berjeaut found archive photos that the book’s graphic artist, Achdé, used to draw black characters. Gone are the dehumanizing properties. Each black character is drawn as an individual.
Marc N’Guessan, a cartoonist whose father is from Ivory Coast, said the portrayal of the “diversity of black faces” was a belated recognition of black humanity in a classic comic book.
“We don’t all look the same,” he said.
