The adventures of the cowboy Lucky Luke, hero of the comic series of the same name, will also put a smile on adults’ faces. “This reminds me of my childhood,” said Dominique Puts, leaning over a black-and-white drawing of a saloon scene in the gallery of Christie’s auction house in Paris. The 67-year-old has been a fan for six decades and knows every page, as he proudly said. “But I can’t afford to bid,” he added with a smile.
Christie’s auctioned original Lucky Luke comics for the first time on Friday, a “world first” according to the auction house. The 50 original pages by the Belgian illustrator Morris achieved a total of almost 2.2 million euros. Most of the individual pages changed hands for 60 to 70,000 euros.
“Morris is the last author in this category not yet on the market,” says Christie’s head of sales Vincent Belloy. The illustrator of Lucky Luke is “one of the most outstanding comic artists in the French-speaking world”. Morris is in line with the artists of Asterix and Obelix and Tintin.
© AFP/Dimitar Dilkoff
Morris’ style is “clear, efficient and dynamic” and therefore very modern, says Belloy. The series also reflects the history of the so-called Wild West in the USA. It features, for example, the famous cowboys Billy The Kid and Jesse James and the adventurer Calamity Jane.
Lucky Luke defeats a number of crooks in the individual volumes, be it through his cunning, his luck or his quick grab for a revolver. What every fan knows: Lucky Luke shoots faster than his shadow.
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Morris, whose real name was Maurice de Bevere, created the lanky cowboy character in 1947. When Morris died in 2001 at the age of 77, he left behind 72 volumes. At first he wrote the stories himself, later he concentrated on the drawings and entrusted the scenarios to the French author René Goscinny. The two met in New York and worked together until Goscinny’s death in 1977.
After Morris’ death in 2001, the series was continued by several artists. The inventor’s heirs continued to earn money from it and were in no hurry to sell original drawings. Lucky Luke has been translated into 30 languages and has sold more than 300 million copies worldwide.
Luke’s penchant for cigarettes also fell victim to success. For the first 37 years he always had one in his mouth. From 1983 onwards this was replaced by a blade of grass – not least because of a changed awareness of the role model character of comic heroes.
“The stories that René Goscinny wrote are funnier,” says his long-time fan Dominique Puts. He still enjoys reading the cowboy’s adventures today: “I always discover something new in the stories.”
The latest volume in the series was released almost at the same time as the originals were auctioned: under the title “Last Round for the Daltons” it is about, among other things, the culture of German immigrants in the Wild West.