I'm a poor lonesome cowboy word balloon from the end of Lucky Luke

Where Did Lucky Luke’s “Poor Lonesome Cowboy” Song Come From? Origins and History

“Poor Lonesome Cowboy” is the title of the song that Lucky Luke sings at the end of every album since 1957. It is a real cowboy song from the 19th century, though the exact author is unknown. Lucky Luke’s creator, Morris, heard the song in a Gary Cooper western movie. It fit Lucky Luke’s character so well that he added it into his stories with writer Rene Goscinny.

Lucky Luke sings "Poor Lonesome Cowboy" into the sunset at the end of another adventure
from Lucky Luke v75

There’s more to the story than that, though. We need to go all the way back to the War of Mexican Independence in the early 1800s. From there, we’ll see how cowboys in the post-Civil War era did their work, entertained themselves and their cattle, and became the model for a whole movie genre.

The version of the song that’s so well known in France is a complete rewrite made for the first Lucky Luke animated movie by a team of musicians that are characters in their own right.

I’ll cover all that and more — including an early false start, a music rights dispute, a serious journalist who dabbled in movie music on the side, and even a Hitler cameo — over the course of this article.

Let’s start with that American History lesson:

A Little Texas Cowboy History

The story behind “Poor Lonesome Cowboy” begins with the Mexican War of Independence. (Warning: The following history is simplified. There’s a lot of fascinating things at work here, but it’s outside the scope of this article. You can skip ahead to “Singing Cowboys” if you don’t want the deep background.)

In 1820 (and continuing even after Mexico gained its independence from Spain), Spain allowed Anglos (non-Hispanic whites) to settle in an eastern section of what would become Texas. It was a sparsely populated region that could use some warm bodies to help defend it against the local American Indian tribes (such as the Comanches).

The local Mexicans — the Tejanos — specifically wanted to add people to their region so they could be populated enough to create a new official Mexican state.

Win/Win/Win, right?

To entice people to come, the new Spain-free Mexican government promised new settlers 177 acres to farm on, the right to graze animals, and everyone’s favorite government helper: tax breaks!

It all, of course, backfired on them.

It was a great plan, except the new people didn’t exactly stick to it. The Anglo population settled where they wanted to. They came in larger numbers than expected. And, suddenly, they wanted to be their own independent state. The local Tejanos joined in with them and thus did the Texas region fight the Texas Revolution to remake themselves as an independent territory (1836).

That lead to even more people coming to Texas, and suddenly the Tejanos found themselves a minority on their own land.

America annexed Texas in 1845. There followed, of course, the Mexican-American War a year later. At the end of that war, Mexico lost what would be Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and a chunk of California.

The simple plan to allow new farmers in to protect against American Indians had backfired spectacularly.

The Other Sticking Point: Slavery

Throughout all of this, there was another bone of contention between the new settlers and the Mexican population: Slavery.

Mexico wasn’t so keen on slavery. They formally abolished it in 1829. While it was a principled stand for many, the Mexican economy also wasn’t reliant on slavery anymore. With its growing population of mestizos and indigenous peoples, the slave trade that Spain had brought to Mexico to get work done had died down from its peak in the 1600s.

Slavery was a thing the Spaniards brought over, and Mexico wanted nothing to do with Spain once they had their independence. Also, they didn’t need the slaves in large numbers anymore, so it was an easy call to make. (The Mexican government wasn’t exactly pure of spirit here. When they separated from Spain, they gave lesser rights to Mexicans of mixed or Indian descent, as opposed to Mexicans of Spanish descent.)

As white Americans started to settle in Texas, they saw cotton as the way to grow the economy, and that meant they brought slaves with them to tend to the fields. They worked around Mexico’s anti-slavery position by recategorizing slaves as ‘indentured servants’ — free people who happened to sign a contract that they would work for free for the rest of their lives. Six of one, half dozen of the other, really.

The Texas Revolution wasn’t about slavery, per se, but it was a point of contention.

So, to recap:

  • Mexico fought for independence from Spain in 1821.
  • Fifteen years later, Texas fought for its independence.
  • Ten years after that, Mexico and America went to war over Texas.
  • Just over twenty years after that, because history loves repetition so much, America had a Civil War.

Many farmers in Texas left to fight in the Civil War for the Confederacy. Their slaves — sorry, “indentured servants” — were left on the farm to handle all the work on their own.

Of Cowboys and Cattle

(Stand by. We’re getting back to Lucky Luke here in a couple paragraphs.)

When the Civil War ended and the slaves were freed, many escaped to Mexico. Many who stayed had skills that would make them great cowboys. They knew how to ride a horse and herd animals and work on the open plains.

A Lucky Luke album included a cattle stampede happening throughout downtown...
From “Lucky Luke in Desperado City”

As it happened, Texas became a center of the cattle trade soon after the war. Keep in mind that this was before barbed wire had been invented, which is the subject of another Lucky Luke book, “Barbed Wire on the Prairie”. Herds of cattle too large to be fenced in could only be controlled by a group of cowboys riding alongside them. 2500 cattle would come out of Texas at a time, tended to by ten cowboys, a chef, and a boss who was essentially the project manager.

Keeping cattle on a farm and then moving them, en masse, north to places like Omaha and Kansas City to be sold off (see “Stern” v2), was the kind of work that always needed fresh blood.

It is estimated that one in four cowboys in the second half of the 19th century were African-American, often working peacefully alongside white cowboys. They were freed slaves whose skills working around farms gave them the skills to make them natural cowboys.

One thing they brought with them from their days of working in the plantation fields was music.

Singing Cowboys

They were a real thing.

Cowboys in the American west of the late 1800s spent long stretches of time driving cattle around the country. They sang to their cattle and to each other along the way, as a way to entertain themselves and pass the time.

That music was a mix of influences. It included some yodeling and some British folk music influences, but it also included a lot of blues music, contributed by the freed slaves.

One of the reasons we know of this is because one musicologist in the early 20th century, John Lomax, ran around trying to capture this music before it was lost as the era of the cattle-driving cowboy came to a close. He would literally go into bars with a huge megaphone machine that could record sound, and ask cowboys to sing into it so he could record them.

He eventually published a book titled “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads” in 1920. You can listen to an audio book version of it, where most of the songs are read as poetry. You’ll recognize one or two. For sure, you’ll recognize “A Home on the Range.”

Another one of those songs was titled “Poor Lonesome Cowboy.” It’s track 13 in that audio book.

Here’s a transcript:

I ain’t got no father
I ain’t got no father
I ain’t got no father
To buy the clothes I wear

I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long ways from home.

I ain’t got no mother
I ain’t got no mother
I ain’t got no mother
To mend the clothes I wear.

I ain’t got no sister
I ain’t got no sister
I ain’t got no sister to go and play with me.

I ain’t got no brother
I ain’t got no brother
I ain’t got no brother to drive the steers with me.

I ain’t got no sweetheart
I ain’t got no sweetheart
I ain’t got no sweetheart to sit and talk with me.

I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long ways from home.

When NPR did a piece about singing cowboys, they called this song out in particular:

“You take a song like, ‘I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a long long way from my home.’ Is that a blues form? It’s the earliest blues form there is — three lines and a tag line,” Edwards says.

Edwards traces this blues connection to a place where cultures mixed.

“If you go down to deep south Texas where this music was really born, on that coastal bend down there, you had white cowboys, black cowboys and Mexican vaqueros — who were very musical people,” Edwards says. “And so the white guys learned a lot of that stuff, and that’s why a lot of that stuff sounded like the blues.”

Those songs, the piece explains, were less about a story and more about a feeling or a picture being painted. There’s definitely no narrative in that song. It’s just a self-descriptive meditation from a lonesome cowboy’s point of view.

It’s a very simple song, but one that struck a chord with an America-loving cartoonist from Belgium…

“Poor Lonesome Cowboy” Jumps to Hollywood

Along Came Jones title screen.  Gary Cooper movie.

The song made the jump into movies in July of 1945 with the western, “Along Came Jones.” Gary Cooper starred as a singing cowboy that parodied many of his previous singing cowboy roles. “Poor Lonesome Cowboy” was one of his musical digressions in the movie.

Ironically, his character in the movie isn’t very handy with a gun. At one moment in the movie, he’s even referred to as a “butterfinger gun juggler.”

He was the exact opposite of Lucky Luke.

If you want to listen to it, “Along Came Jones” is streaming on Amazon Prime. Cooper sings the song near the end of the movie (at the 1:23:43 mark) as he leaves the local jail. The lyrics are barely audible, but that might be from it being a 75 year old movie and film preservation not being at its best.

“I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, I’m a poor lonesome cowboy. I ain’t got no sweetheart, I’m a long way from home. I ain’t got no sweetheart, I ain’t got no sweetheart. I’m a poor lonesome cowboy, and a long way from home…”

Gary Cooper in "Along Came Jones" singing "Poor Lonesome Cowboy"

Lucky Luke’s creator, Morris, was a big fan of movies, and the American Western in particular:

“For a long time, the Western did indeed remain a B-list genre. There was always singing. The good guys were dressed in light colors, the villains in black. But, that setting still appealed to me. To me, Westerns are the ultimate expression of cinema,” said Morris said in a 1967 interview quoted in “Lucky Luke – The Complete Collection” volume 1.

The same book has the movie playing in Belgium in November 1947, shortly before his American trip.

If I was Morris sitting in a dark movie theater and heard a song about a “poor lonesome cowboy”, my ears would have perked up, too. It’s a perfect match for Lucky Luke, even in the character’s earliest days.

And, in fact, the song first appeared at the end of “Lucky Luke Versus Cigarette Cesar” in October 1948. That short story is reprinted in Cinebook’s “Arizona” volume, as well as the first volume of the aforementioned “Complete Collection”.

it was very early in Morris' run on "Lucky Luke" that he first closed a story with "Poor Lonesome Cowboy."

It’s a one-off occurrence, and it would still be a few years before “Rails on the Prairie” established it in 1957 as the concluding panel for every Lucky Luke album moving forward. Here’s what that looked like:

This is the first time Morris and Goscinny had Lucky Luke riding off into the sunset, singing "Poor Lonesome Cowboy"

That panel was drawn nearly a decade after Morris likely first heard the song in a movie theater.

This is also when Rene Goscinny began scripting the series. Morris and Goscinny originally met in America, but their collaboration didn’t start until their returns to France. Morris wanted to concentrate on the art, which he enjoyed more.

The two would collaborate for 35 albums in total, right up until Goscinny’s death in 1977. (“Rails on the Prairie” appears as the 32nd book in the series as published by Cinebook, because they publish the series out of order.)

“Poor Lonesome Cowboy” as a final panel became a tradition for “Lucky Luke” that has lasted more than 60 years, including all of the most current books in the series.

Lucky Luke only sang those same two lines from the song that most applied to his life. He never went any deeper, with one exception we’ll get to in a bit.

The song is well known in France, but it’s not from the original Hollywood singing cowboy version. The song had a major update to its lyrics for a very popular movie starring — you guessed it — Lucky Luke.

“Daisy Town”

In 1971, Lucky Luke debuted in his first animated movie, titled “Daisy Town.”

It was a true inside job: Rene Goscinny is credited as director, co-producer, and co-writer (with Morris).

In the movie, a wagon train stumbles across a daisy growing in the middle of nowhere. They stop and build a town up around it. Unfortunately, that draws the attention of some less-than-savory characters, including the Daltons. Lucky Luke happens upon the town, dispatches some of the bad element relatively quickly, and is instantly offered the job of sheriff.

It’s not a direct copy of any one Lucky Luke album, but does incorporate elements from across a number of them. A comic book adaptation of the book came out in 1983, with art by Pascal Dabère. (In my review of “Daisy Town,” I called it the perfect introduction to the character for new readers.) Dabère was an artist in what was effectively the Lucky Luke licensing department. He previously had drawn another book adapting the 1978 Lucky Luke animated feature, “Ballad of the Daltons”.

Lucky Luke Daisy Town cover header

An American-dubbed version of the movie appeared in North America, with all of the voices done by Rich Little. For those of you under the age of 40, Little was a very popular impressionist in the 70s and 80s. His Reagan impersonation was the definitive one. (Fred Travalena might disagree, but now I’m digging deep…)

The movie, of course, ended with animated Lucky Luke traveling off into the sunset, singing “Poor Lonesome Cowboy.”

Claude Bolling, a noted French jazz pianist and movie composer, did the score for the movie as well as a new treatment for this song.

The song featured new and expanded lyrics from Jack Fishman. Fishman has a ridiculously impressive IMDB bibliography. He’s written lyrics for songs in movies going all the way back to 1948. His credits continued all the way up to his death in 1997, and then beyond. His resume includes work in everything from “Anchorman” to “Superman IV”.

He often wrote uncredited because of his day job as a journalist, which included at least two stints as a newspaper editor. He was afraid he wouldn’t be taken seriously with that or his books on World War II concentration camps if he was also known as “that cartoon movie song writer.”

(True story: As a boy, he happened to be in Berlin when a Nazi rally broke out. Hitler walked past and patted him on his head. Fishman would joke later in life that he went bald from that touch.)

Here are Fishman’s new lyrics:

I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
I’m a long long way from home
And this poor lonesome cowboy
Has got a long long way to roam
Over mountains over prairies
From dawn till day is done
My horse and me keep riding
Into the setting sun

Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’re a long long way from home
Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’ve a long long way to roam

There are guys who just figure
Have a problem with a gun
And a finger on a trigger
Can be dangerous, hurt someone
But problems solve much better
By keeping calm and true
My horse and me keep riding
I ain’t nobody’s fool

Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’re a long long way from home
Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’ve a long long way to roam

I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
But it doesn’t bother me
‘Cause this poor lonesome cowboy
Prefers a horse for company
Got nothing against women
But I wave them all goodbye
My horse and me keep riding
We don’t like being tied

Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’re a long long way from home
Lonesome cowboy, lonesome cowboy, you’ve a long long way to roam
To roam

If that last stanza sounds familiar, it’s because it appeared recently in Matthieu Bonhomme’s “Wanted Lucky Luke” in that book’s final panel.

In the last panel of "Wanted Lucky Luke," Paul Bonhomme uses the "Daisy Town" version of "Poor Lonesome Cowboy"

It’s the only time in my memory that Lucky Luke sang such an extended cut of the song at the end of the book. Likely, it’s because it tied in so well to the events of the story and it was a nice Easter egg for longtime Lucky Luke fans.

This rewrite of the song also drove it further away from its roots as a blues song. It became more of a pop/country ditty.

The Pat Woods Saga

Pat Woods performed the new version of “Poor Lonesome Cowboy” at the end of “Daisy Town.”

American country singer who hit it bigger in Europe, Pat Woods

Pat Woods was born in Portland, Oregon in 1944. He learned to play guitar after his family moved to Dallas, Texas. He moved to New York City to chase a music career, and then to Paris, where he began teaching guitar lessons.

He found a community of expat American musicians there and became part of the scene, eventually becoming friends with a French jazz pianist by the name of Claude Bolling. That’s the connection that landed him the “Lucky Luke” gig.

He eventually moved to Belgium and toured Europe with a western music act.

Now, for the entertaining, mysterious, and possibly “scandalous” tangent:

A press release from September 1, 2004 proudly announced Woods’ new website and CD, “Truths: Volume 1”. It triumphantly proclaimed that in its first full day on the internet, the site saw traffic from 7 different countries. That number rose to more than 60 in the first week. (We were easily impressed by the web in 2004….)

I’m not linking to the website, PatWoods.com, because it is currently off-line. That didn’t surprise me too much. This is a press release from 17 years ago. I don’t know if Pat Woods is even still alive.

I did what any internet sleuth would do and I looked the site up on The Internet Archive.

I had to go back as far as the December 15, 2004 capture to find anything.

It was not what I expected.

Only three months after the release of his CD, the website consisted of a single picture of Pat Woods with the headline “I hope it was worth it!”

The paragraph of text underneath the image quotes copyright law and ends with:

 Thus, in the sound recording “Pat Woods Truths V-1,” while as the performer you may have copyright in the underlying musical compositions, Darren Ferguson has copyright in the compact discs or other media that contain the final recording of your music.

If you reproduce, revise, or distribute these compact discs without his authorization, you will be in violation of U.S. Copyright Law. Furthermore, under the Berne Convention, copyright holders in the United States may be granted similar protections in foreign countries without regard to their nationality.

This letter is to make you aware of Darren’s copyright interests in the sound recording “Pat Woods Truths V-1.” Should you have additional questions you should retain your own counsel to advise you. Copyright D.P.F., INC 
[email protected]

(I added in a couple paragraph breaks there to make the whole thing more readable.)

Two things jump out at me here:

First, and most obvious, there’s a dispute here over the ownership of the final recordings. Was the producer never paid and so he didn’t allow them to be released? Was there a misunderstanding between artist and producer, somehow? Did Woods ever go The Full Taylor Swift and re-record all his music again so he could release it later?

Second, did the producer own the PatWoods.com website? He seems to have an email address there, and he was able to change the website to look like this.

The site went offline entirely by January 23, 2005.

It’s tough to find any more information about Pat Woods on-line. Even more confusingly, there’s an Irish folk singer named Pat Woods, a horn player named Pat Wood, and a finger style guitarist by the name of Patrick Woods. None of them seem to have any issues with their producers that I can tell.

But Pat Woods, friend of Claude Bolling and singer of “Poor Lonesome Cowboy”, will live on forever thanks to his performance of this one song. It’s still very well known France.

The song appeared again in the second animated Lucky Luke movie, “Ballad of the Daltons.” That movie was again written and co-produced by Goscinny, but released after Goscinny’s death in 1977.

In 2020, during confinement (the French word for quarantine), a group of French singers came together to record a cover of “Poor Lonesome Cowboy”. There’s also a 2016 recording from Mylinda Farr that’s vocally interesting (a capella).

To Sum It All Up

If you look around on-line, you’ll see oft-quoted the fact that Morris was inspired by a Gary Cooper movie to use an old song from a movie in “Lucky Luke.” While true, it only gives you half of the story and none of the context.

Now you have all of it. Lucky Luke’s “Poor Lonesome Cowboy” is a contemporary song for the character. It would not be anachronistic for him to sing it. There’s no telling just how far it goes back, but it was documented at the start of the twentieth century to be a song from the 1800s that cowboys did sing. It was, indeed, that Gary Cooper movie where Morris first heard it. Morris used it right away in an earlier volume before settling in with it a decade later as the ending for every albums once his friend, Rene Goscinny, came on board.

The song went on to lead a second life thanks to an animated “Lucky Luke” movie where it was rewritten and gained greater popularity.

The world works in interesting ways sometimes. You just need to dig a level or two deeper.

Additional Resources

I had so many. I used a lot of Wikipedia articles to gather the general history of early Texas, Spanish Mexico, and all of those wars, revolutions, and secessions. Then I dug deeper and started to feel like I was back in college again, reading papers and cross-referencing dates and wars.

Here are some notable resources, if you’re interested in reading more:

The Lesser Known History of African-American Cowboys” at SmithsonianMag.com

Who Were the Cowboys Behind ‘Cowboy Songs’?” at NPR

Texas and Mexico: Centers for Cultural Collision” at TeachingHistory.org

Mexican War of Independence Begins” at History.com

Mexico in His Head” is an excellent paper on the history of slavery along the Mexico/Texas border in the 1800s

Anglo-American Colonization” at The Texas State Historical Association

Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads” (free audio book) at Librivox.org

History Nebraska has a great newspaper article from 1875 describing the Texas Cattle trade

Lambiek Comiclopedia: Pascal Debere

Lambiek Comiclopedia: Morris


What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)

40 Comments

  1. See, this is exactly the kind of deep dive that will bring your Lucky Luke agenda to the next level 😉

    Up until now I had no idea that this little rhyme at the end of each album had a proper story behind it. I’m sure 99.9% of LL readers out here have no idea either. For decades as a young reader it was left to my imagination what the little ditty would sound like, since there was never a footnote in the books themselves, or even an article in specialised magazines about such a trivial matter. Until I saw Daisy Town that is, on the big screen in 1971 at the ripe old age of 5, and I can tell you that the chorus of that final song was carved in my memory forever. I catch myself whistling it out loud sometimes.
    Of course kids now have it easy, you can find the full ending clip on youtube here
    youtube.com/watch?v=XpJd80tTojg
    , as is or with the full translation.
    Heck even watch the full movie here for free
    youtube.com/watch?v=n-62oaDRdAM&ab_channel=MerothTV
    I can tell you I still have my original VHS tape for it but I’m not sure how worn out it must be…

    I remember Rich Little from those old Dean Martin Roasts he was sometimes part of when they couldn’t get Orson Welles, so I’d be curious to hear what the english version sounds like. In the French version Marcel Bozzuffi, famed character actor played Luke and it’s the first case I’m aware of of stunt casting, having a real actor instead of a voice specialist instead of Jacques Thebault which for me will always be THE voice of Lucky Luke (probably because he was Dead or Alive’s Steve McQueen and Wild Wild West’s Robert Conrad before).

    Now all I have to do is wait for Brother Zachary to join me in bringing out our makeshift Augie voodoo dolls and start chanting until you’re convinced to get on it 😀

    1. I admit that it is fun to break out the American History hat again and dive deep into research and discover lots of interesting little things along the way. And a LOT of Lucky Luke reviews would have to involve short (or not-so-short) tangents into history, so…

      I’m not saying I’m not doing it. I’m just saying it won’t be a year-long quest. It’ll happen as I go along. But if I REALLY get into it, then I’ll speed it up. 😉

      Given how many other reviews I have half written at the moment, I shouldn’t make any promises.

      I think I milked everything out of the song I could. I admit that I had to cut out three quarters of the interesting stuff related to the Spain/Mexico/America sequence of wars, though.

      I also see where they recently released a new DVD boxed set of remasters of three animated Lucky Luke films.

      https://www.esc-distribution.com/enfant-jeunesse/5750-lucky-luke-3-films-3309450046376.html

      I don’t know how much better they look now — they’re also only DVD releases, not Blu-ray. Curious.

      I don’t know if I’d have the patience for the movies these days. They’re not streaming anywhere in North America. A couple of the live action movies are available to rent or buy digitally, though. I’ll put them on the Lucky Luke Agenda. 😉

      it’s surprising to me that they were using big name actors in animated films that early. To me, that kind of casting started at Disney in the 1980s, and has progressed to the ridiculousness it is today, leading to a bunch of uninteresting-sounding characters who all sound alike.

      But I digress….

      Now excuse me while I figure out which review to write next!

      1. Re: those wars. This is a part of history that always interested me, even though, or maybe because, it was hardly mentioned when I was in school. Considering that the French were involved in it at some point, I think it’s a shame we don’t get to dive in this even deeper. Oddly enough, I discovered that part as I was watching episodes of the Wild Wild West as a kid, (maybe second or third season) that tangentially touched on the historical context, which goes to show that if you insert educational stuff in a smart way into entertainment, you can learn a lot from Lucky Luke, the Bluecoats, Blueberry, etc. Food for thought. There is a book here waiting to be written on how european BD used to depict the old west.
        As for the movie, yes you’re absolutely right, it was 1971 for god’s sake! I rewatched it last night and I’m amazed how well it holds up. The gags, the pacing, it feels like the book but at the same time the anmation gives it an extra level. I was interested to discover the name of Nic Broca in the end credits, as head animator, of Spirou fame of course (or shame , I guess, depending how you view that period of the series). I mean sure you have to brush off the one mexican and the one asian caricature, very much on par with the book, that until recently never seemed to shock anyone, and the fact that there are zero black characters in it (maybe for the best this one).
        Overall, I honestly like this movie better than the Asterix films pre-12 Labours. They involve the same people pretty much from the production side, the only major creative input difference is Morris, so I credit for the extra quality of this one.
        And of course, as you pointed out, the music score for this movie is amazing. Hats off to Claude Bolling, if you look at his wiki page, it’s incredible how good this guy was.
        For those who might be interested I found this delightful youtube channel celebrating classic French voice actors.
        youtube.com/channel/UCqvmBMd9ZHtKugsaxWCLHjw/videos
        I spent a very emotional hour on this after the film yesterday…

        And finally… Yay! Voodoo works!
        And it’s the weekend, so life is good.

        1. I’ll write more later, but — I do recognize the name Nic Broca. He also helped design The Snorks. I have another article I’ve been working on and off on in the past few months about The Smurfs vs The Snorks. There’s some amazing stories in there, but the information I’ve found often doesn’t line up between multiple sources. I haven’t been confident enough to run with it when I have to hand wave my way through some important details, or when I can’t find a good explanation for a certain business practice, etc. It’s frustrating, but I’ll get there…. And, of course, everything I find on Google all sources the same article. Maybe I need to start researching in French somehow. 😉

            1. Thanks, I’ll let you know if there’s anything you might be able to help with. Right now, the biggest problem I can remember is putting together a timeline of events. And that’s just a matter of who told the story and how. I don’t think it’s a translation problem, but maybe there’s material in French I don’t know about that’s closer to the source. I need to review my notes…

              1. It’s up to you really, I’ve been collecting magazines about BD and comics since the 70s and they have tons of interviews and erudite essays that I enjoy rereading every chance I get, most of it in French of course and hardly ever reprinted anywhere as far as I know.
                Back when I was writing articles here and there, digging through my archives was always the most fun for me, much to the despair of my then girlfriend 😉

            2. On my trip down memory lane yesterday evening I watched Tintin et le Lac aux Requins movie from 1972 and lo and behold Nic Broca’s name shows up again in the art credits. Seems that he was on Belvision’s staff at the time. Very enjoyable movie written by the legendary Michel Greg in the grand tradition of Herge. And like Daisy Town it was never properly adapted into BD. Shame. The animation derived from grea BD series would deserve a book for itself.

              1. Nic Broca is everywhere all of a sudden. Once I came across his name in one place, it keeps coming up all over. =) It is a shame they didn’t do as many “Art of” books back then as they do today. And all that raw material is probably long destroyed. They wouldn’t be able to do one now if they wanted to…

        2. It’s amazing how we absorb lessons from unrelated things. It sticks with us when we learn about history from a sit-com or a period drama better than when we read a chapter in school. There’s a lot I can tell you about Ancient Roman or Greek history and mythology that I learned from X-Men more than I ever did in school.

          The thing with history is that it just never ends and there’s always MORE of it. I’m pretty sure we touched on none of the stuff I just wrote about in the past week at school. There was likely a paragraph on Texas being annexed from the Mexicans, but not much more. It was probably part of the chapter about the Louisianna Purchase and Manifest Destiny. There’s never enough time to go deeply into details, particularly when the Civil War was right around the corner and that would always be a big focus. It took until high school before a teacher said, “We cover all these wars in History class, but never get to Korea or Vietnam, so we’re going to skip over some of this stuff…” The 20th century post-WWII stuff always got short shrift.

          And now, as a man in his mid-40s, of course I’ve spent time in the last year watching WWII documentaries on Netflix. It’s what my kind do. 😉

          One note about Spirou in the 70s: There was one series about a group of kids which included a Black boy. I think Jean Roba may have been involved with it? Was that the 70s or 80s? I’ll have to look it up next time I’m in that box of magazines….

          1. Everyone in France this week is about celebrating Napoleon and I think his armies were involved in fighting in Mexico at some point. The fun part of studying history is when historians disagree about what happened and why… Everything becomes controversial these days.

            yes La ribambelle is my favourite Roba series. It’s been said that Franquin came up with the premise, not sure if it’s true.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ribambelle

            1. The French “intervention” in Mexico was in 1861-1863 – that’s Napoleon III.

              Coincidentally to what Augie was saying, we hardly touched upon that period in school, and never that specific war. I know about it because I had a Legionnaire neighbour, and he kept yammering on about Camerone every year; and because of Cinco de Mayo in America – which ironically is a celebration of a Mexican victory over French forces, something that most Americans do not even remotely suspect when they party “Mexican-style” on that day!

              History is so much fun! ^_^

  2. Rails On The Prairie is actually Cinebook’s 32nd Lucky Luke book and the 9th Lucky Luke book chronologically. And it seems like you are starting to do “The Lucky Luke Agenda” here.

    1. Thanks — I corrected the volume number in the article. My Google search fact check returned a French edition, where it IS T37, but I had the Cinebook book ten feet away from me and I got to lazy to get up to double check it. argh!

      It is inevitable that there will be a Lucky Luke round-up page at some point. I dabble in Lucky Luke. Over time, I’m sure there will be bursts of activity. It’ll all come together in the end. I’m still learning and reading. =)

      1. You are welcome, and Cinebook’s 37th Lucky Luke books is actually Fingers from 1983, and Fingers is the 52nd Lucky Luke chronologically.

        1. And is by Dutch comics artist and writer Lo Hartog Van Banda who also wrote the 57th Lucky Luke book Nitroglycerin from 1987 and the 61st Lucky Luke book Ghost Hunt from 1992.

  3. And the extended version of I’m A Poor Lonesome Cowboy appears at the end of the 54th Lucky Luke book “Bride of Lucky Luke” from 1985.

  4. Brilliant article. 🙂 This kind of deep dive is what I’m often going through while translating, any time I need to check some detail (or decide to check a detail when it’s not necessarily needed …)
    In fact, I remember going down the exact same rabbit hole as you here, finding the Gary Cooper reference, watching the movie – well, fast-forwarding through it, really – and landing in the Pat Woods dead end eventually. I did way less digging on the Bolling and Fishman front (that Hitler anecdote is great!), and I can’t even remember WHY I even started …

    It’s one of the joys (and curses; it must have cost me several hours of actual work!) of my job. 🙂

    1. When will Cinebook’s 81st Lucky Luke book come out? Possibly in December of 2021 to coincide with Lucky Luke’s 75th birthday, which is on December 7th, 2021 possibly?

      1. 80 is planned for September, and we should have more books coming out at the end of the year – check our next catalogue to know for sure (can’t say more for now, sorry!)

        1. Okay, then I will whenever Cinebook’s Summer/Autumn catalogue comes possibly sometime this month, or sometime next month in June possibly.

    2. Thanks, Jerome! Happy you liked it — you’re much closer to the source material than I am, so that means a lot. I can only imagine he rabbit holes you go down. Mine were pretty deep, but at least they were mostly constrained to one topic. (Well, technically, three different topics, if you count each of the three wars separately.)

      Heh, I fast-forwarded through most of the movie looking for the song, too. I got SO frustrated. I expected him to be singing it on horse back. I found two other songs, but never the right one. I was about ready to give up on it when I started skipping to the beginning of each scene and got lucky that I started near the END of the movie.

      The movie doesn’t actually seem all that bad. I enjoyed parts of it that I got sucked into watching. The rear projection screen they used for the horse riding scenes was early tech and pretty awful, though.

      I left out all the stuff I learned about Gary Cooper, most of which wouldn’t have painted him in a great light in modern times. Yikes.

      1. Oh? Darn. Now I have to look into him …

        Those inquisitive digressions cost me a lot in terms of productivity, but they’re a big chunk of what makes the job fun. Learning all about EMP and neutron bombs one day, looking up cowboy songs the next, double-checking German WWII-era uniforms and ranks, brushing up on my 18th century nautical vocabulary, learning about trade routes between Western seaboard native tribes, parsing information about Norse legends and trying to remove all the new agey made-up stuff from the historical bits … Never a dull moment! 🙂

  5. What do you think will be Lucky Luke’s next adventure that come out later next in 2022 will be? Possibly about Wild Bill Hickok or the 1st Kentucky Derby in 1875 possibly?

      1. I saw that Jean-Yves Ferri commented on an Instagram post by Achde with the Dalton Gang’s mother in it from a scene from the 38th Lucky Luke book Ma Dalton from 1971 where she has a gun in her hand and her gun is put in her bag after shooting it with smoke coming out of the tube where the bullets come out of.

              1. Maybe someday Jean-Yves Ferri will help write some Lucky Luke books someday, because Jean-Yves Ferri and Achde, the current artist of the Lucky Luke series are very good friends.

  6. You should someday do a Watch Mojo esque video of the Top 10 series Cinebook should translate into English someday.

    1. There are a couple of articles in the archives where I’ve called out titles I wish would be translated. (I think half of the books in the first list have since been published.) And there are at least two more of them in drafts that I’ll post someday — they have themes, but not enough books yet to fill out a list long enough to publish.

  7. There’s an earlier rendition of Lonesome Cowboy on film, sung in the movie “The Silver Trail” from 1937.

  8. Cinebook’s 81st Lucky Luke book titled: The Hanged Man’s Rope and other Stories is set to come out in June of next year in 2022 in the UK, and on October 1st, 2022, in North America in the US and Canada. By then, after a span of 16 years, from 2006-2022, of translating all of the now 81 books in the Lucky Luke series as of now, Cinebook would have to find another Franco-Belgian comic series with a lot of albums to translate next possibly Spirou and Fantasio which has 55 books in the series as of now, or even The Bluecoats, which has 65 books in that series as of now.

    1. Actually, Cinebook’s 81st Lucky Luke book comes out in the UK in July of 2022, and three months later across the pond in North America in the US and Canada on October 1st, 2022.

        1. Okay, if you say so. That book in particular is the 50th book chronologically: The Hanged Man’s Rope and Other Stories which came out in French in 1982.