MY FAVORITE COMICS - Lucky Luke

   My relationship with Lucky Luke is similar to what I have with Astérix, although I'd say that the later is closer to my heart than the former simply because I've read more Astérix books than Lucky Luke. Both are pretty much synonymous with comic books on Europe, yet they've also managed to transcend the medium to the point where they've become popular culture icons, which makes it hard to have some degree of objectivity analising them. Again, just as with Astérix, my contact with Lucky Luke came via my uncle and cousins who had most if not all of the character's albums. As a kid, the only Lucky Luke comics I was lucky enough to get were "Western Circus" and "La Caravane", both of which, coincidentally enough, I'd rank as different from what the popular perception usually equates with Lucky Luke books - no Daltons, no Rantanplan...

While this is french-belgium bande-dessinée, I can't help but think that if there's anything worthy of being called "comics", it's these books. Morris and Goscinny's mastery of the medium exudes with caricature and humor of the finest kind. Another of the lasting impressions I was left with from these two particular books were the unforgetable secondary characters. To this day I can't help but smile whenever I remember Nelson the one-eyed vegetarian lion, the drunk Ringmaster (a caricature of W.C. Fields) or Ugly Barrow the constantly cursing wagon driver. Fun stuff!

MY FAVORITE COMICS - Astérix

Familiarity breeds contempt. Astérix tends to prove this. At least, in my case, it does. Sometimes, some works or authors can be so ubiquituous and relliable in the quality or timeliness of their delivery, that one tends to take them for granted. In the case of Astérix, I think it's always been around me, in some form or another, to the point where sometimes I have a hard time thinking of it as a comic like any other. One of the earliest books I had featured Astérix - it wasn't one of the characters proper BD album, but an adaptation to little pre-school children in a small format. There were Asterix animated movies and toys, too. Looking back, it is the closest thing to the evil Disney empire europeans have that I can think of. So, it's easy to take it for granted just like any other massmedia discardable product... and it only got worse with time...

Still, I must concede that these were some of my favorite comics as a kid. I should add that I didn't have the Astérix books as a kid BUT my uncle and cousins did have ALL the albums! So, whenever I visited them I had the good fortune of getting to read or at the very least see these wonderful books. I'd say that along with the work of Carl Barks, these were the first comics that gave me the impression of a unique fully realized coherent world - something incredibly hard to pull off in fiction. And the apparent facility with which Goscinny and Uderzo seemed to pull it off, only enhances its effect.