Lucky Luke v66: “The Promised Land”
Artist: Achde
Colorist: Mel
Lettering: Design Amorandi
Translator: Jerome Saincaintin
Published by: Cinebook
Number of Pages: 48
Original Publication: 2016
Lucky Luke helps an old cowboy pal’s family complete their immigration journey, taking them from Saint Louis to Montana. They are Ashkenazi Jews moving to America and settling in with family who is already established there. Lucky Luke is a friendly helper, but has a lot to learn about this new culture.
The Politics of Lucky Luke
When this book came out a couple years back, I remember reading all the write-ups about how timely it was in light of various refugee situations going on in the world. The reviews for the book were overwhelmingly popular, but I wondered how much of that was because of the hype and the “timeliness” of the book.
The good news is, this book is not a polemic. It’s not really about refugees or illegal immigration or any of the other hot button topics of the day. It’s a story that fits in the time period of the series told in a way that’s sensitive to the cultural issues of the day. The characters aren’t drawn in such a way that people could get angry at the book. The new folks aren’t the lost victims who are inhibited from success by their cultural backgrounds.
This is a classic (third wave, if I recall my American History classes well enough) immigrant story from that period of American history. A family comes to America seeking escape from a bad situation at home, and they follow the trail blazed by others in their situation — in this case, other Ashkenazi Jews who set up camp in Montana.
I suppose you could read into this, if you wanted to. To me, this is not a neat parallel for Syria in a multitude of ways. This is just a classic American tale. You can read into it what you want, I suppose, and many did, judging by the reviews.
The real story of this book is that (A) it’s an actual good “Lucky Luke” book that wasn’t done by Rene Goscinny and Morris, and (b) it’s very careful about getting the sensitive cultural parts right, without sacrificing too much humor.
Seriously, that “A” part is a big deal. I’ve never seen it done. I had given up on reading non-Goscinny tales of Lucky Luke before this book.
The Education of Lucky Luke
This is the kinder, gentler Lucky Luke, but no less funny.
This book is 95% comedic adventure, and 5% cultural education. That’s about 5% less comedy than usual.
Reading this book, the thing that struck me most is how, like so many of Rene Goscinny’s stories, the whole book is about the main character meeting someone from a different culture, and then exploring the inevitable clashes in routines, practices, and beliefs. In this book case, it’s Lucky Luke meeting a family of Ashkenazi Jews and getting to know all about them.
It’s not about making fun of stereotypes or poking fun at the new people in the book. Yes, there are plenty of stereotypes in this book that get played for laughs, most notably the Jewish mother and the religiously adherent grandfather. But they’re never the butt of the jokes. They’re always a part of it.
In fact, much of the humor in the book is in Lucky Luke’s learning process. It’s about how he can’t grasp the different ways this Jewish family thinks. He doesn’t get why someone would choose not to eat anything that’s available for hunting on the prairie as they’re passing through. Why wouldn’t you eat pork? It’s delicious!
And, most importantly, perhaps, Lucky Luke goes along with it. He respects it, even if it frustrates him, and causes Jolly Jumper to laugh at him once or twice over it all.
Culture Clashes
The book doesn’t completely shy away from the reactions the family gets as they travel across America. They’re wearing clothes of their culture: the hats, the black clothes, and even the beards. They don’t exactly blend in, and you can see some characters giving them the side-eye or mischaracterizing them as Mormon or Amish, given the similarity in garb.
The ultimate culture clash is against the local Native American population, and that’s just from their past experiences that they’re defending their space from any and all people. Speaking of that, be sure to read the text at the beginning of the issue before the story begins. There’s a big translation/cultural explanation that is explained there about how the American Blackfeet tribe are a play on words on native peoples from the North African area that are more familiar to the French.
The biggest problem with them is that they’re the source of the oldest cliche to be used in this series ever. It’s the old bit about how a culture might make a new person into The Chosen One over a hilarious misinterpretation of ancient prophecy. You know, the guy who walks in wearing certain clothes sounds just like The Chosen One was describes in the ancient texts. Think C3P0 in “Return of the Jedi,” for a close relative of this trope.
I’ll buy it for the sake of this story. There’s a fun parallel made between the Blackfeet and the Ashkenazi Jews, too, that leads to this cute gag:
You can hear those over-the-top voices from a million Jewish comedians in there, can’t you?
A Modern Tale
One thing that caused me to raise an eyebrow on a couple of occasions was the use of very modern references for humor. There’s a “Star Wars” reference in there, for goodness sakes, and it’s pretty good.
(There’s more on the next page, and it’s even funnier.)
But there are also call outs to Harry Potter, Bill Gates, and Bernie Madoff, amongst others.
The last time a Lucky Luke script did that, it threw me out of the story completely. Here, for some reason, it mostly works. The Gates and Potter references felt a little forced, though the others fit right in.
And I know this isn’t particularly timely or modern, but there’s even a Marx Brothers cameo in here. It’s like Achde and Jul were targeting me specifically with this book. And I’m not even Jewish!
In The Style of Morris
They aren’t kidding when they put that on the cover of the book. Achde does as close an approximation of Morris’ style as I’ve seen. The mouths are a little off, but other than that….
Previous artists doing “Lucky Luke” post-Morris tried to keep things in line, but the art always looked too obviously different. It reminded me a lot of how bad looking the Looney Tunes shorts got in the mid-1960s after having a couple of decades of well-animated ones that were lushly animated. The lower budgets killed those shorts, and “Lucky Luke” suffered from much the same fate, for whatever reason.
Achde mimics Morris well. It’s not an exact match, and he has quirks of his own art style in here, but it all blends together nicely. In fact, there are some angles and storytelling decisions in this book that work even better than what Morris would usually do. It’s still mostly medium shots of people talking, but Achde includes some different angles on wider shots along the way, giving just a tease of a more cinematic style.
The biggest thing about “in the style of” here, though, is the coloring. This book was originally published in 2016. They stuck with the color style of the series as it started in the 1960s. There’s no attempt here to model the characters with extra gradients, or to even add more cut-in shadows to give the forms extra depth. This is still super flat colors, going so far as to still paint entire backgrounds or extreme foregrounds in the same blue/purple color.
It looks just like those classic Lucky Luke stories, thanks to that. With a more modern coloring approach, I bet the art would start to look much more modern, too. I wonder if our minds adapt to things like that?
Recommended?
Yes, and this is the first time I’m suggesting even looking at a post-Morris “Lucky Luke” book, let alone recommending one. This one is very good.
I even love the way the cover homages the cover for an earlier volume, “The Tenderfoot”.
— 2018.038 —
Buy It Now
I’m not sure about good. Better than the last few before it, sure. But at the time this came out there was a bit controversy in French Media against Jul who was criticized for blatantly proselytizing for his community, pandering in the lowest way possible and using a beloved series as a vehicule for it. Even some of the jewish community here was embarrassed by the cliched jokes and the outrageous caricatures. That created a backlash from the right-wing political spectrum, for desecrating a classic of French BD. I know Jerome and maybe he toned it down on the translation, but the original was considered pretty offensive.
I don’t know, I grew up seeing and listening to plenty of comedians that came from what they called The Borscht Belt or “The Jewish Alps” in the Catskills mountain region of New York State. There aren’t too many jokes in this book I couldn’t picture Billy Crystal or Jackie Mason or Milton Berle making, to be honest. No doubt, a lot of the humor here is very cliche, but then that’s true of a lot of the humor that infuses Asterix and Lucky Luke and any other title that relies on culture clashes for its jokes.
The denigration of the extreme right wing, at this point, is a badge of honor. We see plenty of that going on on this side of the Atlantic, too, any time a creator infuses any kind of cultural difference into a book.
Sometimes, you’re just not going to make everyone happy, I think.
You could be right about the difference in translation, though. Poor Jerome had to deal with the whole Blackfoot thing, and couldn’t make it work without a paragraph at the top to explain it all. I actually don’t mind that. I’d rather get a little education off the top before reading a book so I get the jokes a little better along the way. Others might complain that if you have to explain the joke, it’s not funny. I think in situations like this, a little education goes a long way. I never would have gotten the joke, otherwise.
It’s always a balancing act, isn’t it?
True, our mileage may vary wildly on subjects like these. First we’re slightly different generations, my grandparents were deep in the middle of WWII and that has an impact on how we were raised, and second, France (also true for Belgium) still has scars about how the puppet-government handled the whole Jew situation back then. Therefore, not tiptoeing, walking right through it with giant clown shoes like this book does is still unsettling to some extent.
Yeah, it’s funny how the cultural differences work. There’s plenty of stuff out of France that will never see print from an American publisher due to the way things are cartooned. I think we talked a little here previously about 80s Spirou, for one example, with the caricatures of Asian and black people. And then there’s a book like this, which I think would work fine over here, but might hit sensitivities over there.
Argh, This all can be so frustrating sometimes. I know it stops translations of some works from American publishers. For good reasons, but still frustrating.
A balancing act is right. :p
That paragraph on the Blackfeet was a necessary evil. I mean, yes, it’s a surrender of sorts for a translator (well, I am French after all; that’s supposed to be our shtick, innit?), but at the same time, there’s just no other way of letting people know. There’s no equivalent I could think of for the ‘pieds noirs’ – even less so one whose name could have worked paired with a Native American tribe… Like you said. Better educated than left in the dark.
As for ‘toning it down’… Nope, not really. We tend, as a matter of course for an 8+ book like Lucky Luke, to avoid swear words and slurs of all kinds (for someone like me who swears like a sailor, it’s rough!), but I never really felt I had to tone anything down. Perhaps because when considering it – oh, yes, we DID look carefully at what was acceptable! – I always had in mind exactly what Augie was talking about: Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks… The kind of jokes they made, the things they said, was perfectly fine in American society (granted, I’m not too sure about the UK – probably about halfway between the US and France, as usual). I figured we were safe.
Yeah, our past over here makes us a lot more touchy on what’s acceptable when speaking of the Jewish community. I find the American approach FAR healthier in this case, but it’s a complicated issue.
Interestingly enough, yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the death of Pierre Desproges, an absolutely fantastic comedian who famously asked the question “should we laugh about anything and everything?”, and who’s regularly cited as the example of how nowadays, in our politically correct world, he’d never had had a career because he crossed so many red lines. One of his best skits started with him looking pensively at the audience for a few seconds, leaning towards them, then saying in a mock-conspiratorial tone: “I’ve been told some Jews sneaked into the theatre…” I wonder how it would fly now – or how it would fly in the US.
Ah, humour. Such a tough subject! But one of the main reasons no Google-bot is going to replace me any time soon! ^_^
I also liked The Promised Land, and I wish my Dutch edition had the explanation about the pieds-noirs at the beginning!
I remember enjoying the post-Goscinny story The Daily Star, definitely check that one out. And I recently read a preview of Fingers, which was also fun, especially at the end. (But I noticed the Izneo preview is shorter than the Dutch preview I read.)
Thanks for your feedback, Jerome. The main question here is, should Lucky Luke be the vehicle for such a blatant proselytizing enterprise, given all the posturing there is in France on this particular subject. So far, Lucky Luke authors had carefully avoided touchy subjects like slavery, for a good reason, so…
Also, wasn’t Black Feet an actual Native American tribe? So I don’t understand what all the commotion was about, in context. If you need a block of text to explain that, for us, Pied-noir can mean something else entirely, it’s the sign that something is seriously wrong with the concept in the first place. All in all, another good reason why this story was inappropriate in a series like this one. I wonder what the publisher was thinking. That’s not how you attract new readers. How did sales go, compared to the rest of the series?
I honestly don’t see any proselytising in there. Maybe I’m blind to such things, but all I saw where jokes about a culture, the way that “The 20th Cavalry” took the piss out of the Irish or “L’Heritage de Rantanplan” did the same for the Chinese. Sure they’re shown in a broadly positive light – it’s Lucky Luke after all. Even ‘L’Heritage’, with all its massively outdated stereotypes and cliches, still painted the Chinese as … well, you know, people, basically decent with the same failings as everyone else…
Like you’ve probably seen now in the English version, the introductory paragraph was to explain that ‘Pieds-noirs’ meant something in French few people outside of France would have known – not to explain the existence of the Blackfoot tribe. That one’s almost a given.
Mileage may vary. shrug This isn’t my favourite Lucky Luke, and I still love and revere Goscinny, but the man was a damned genius; comparing anyone to him is just plain unfair. And I didn’t dislike this book at all – it gave me a few good chuckles and I enjoyed reading it.
Don’t feel sorry for me. 🙂 I didn’t hate it, and the challenging bits are what makes this job a hell of a lot more fun than translating legal documents or technical manuals!
As for sales, I don’t get the exact numbers, but it was second that month in our top 5 sales – behind the phenomenally successful Complete Valerian. So I’d say it did pretty much as well as the other Lucky Luke titles, by and large.
Wait, wasn’t there a recent volume of “The Bluecoats” that dealt with slavery, too? This one: https://www.dupuis.com/les-tuniques-bleues/bd/les-tuniques-bleues-tome-61-l-etrange-soldat-franklin/67500
Or maybe just that it’s the first time we’ve ever seen a slave or had it be a plot point in the series….
Haven’t read ‘Franklin’ yet, but there was the 20th book in the series, ‘Black Face’ – possibly inspired (in part) by Nat Turner’s story, that I still consider one of the absolute best Raoul and Cauvin ever produced. Definitely did more than touch on the topic of slaves and how they were treated by both sides – and boy does it fail to pull any punches…
There were others I’m sure, but that’s the one that stuck to mind.
Oh Boy, indeed. Or should I says ‘Oy Vey’? My goodness. I managed to track down a copy of the english version and I’m afraid to say I couldn’t make it past 10 pages. Now I feel really bad for Jerome who had to translate this dreck. The art is bad, but the writing is worse. The author doesn’t seem to know the difference between ‘immigrate’ and ’emigrate’, and that’s just the beginning. Pffff someone shoot me know.
I walk back everything I said about proselytism; who cares. this book is an offense to the memory of Morris & Goscinny, pure and simple.
I love that there’s someone even crankier than me on this site. =)
I’m still going to chalk this up, in part, to cultural differences, but we’re definitely on opposite sides of this particular fence.
Fair enough, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong on this one. That’s my problem, I tend to have a strong opinion about everything. Must be the Auvergnat in me.
Do you ever think Jean-Yves Ferri will ever write any Lucky Luke books at all in the near future with Achde and Jul.
No I don’t. For all intents and purposes Lucky Luke is as good as dead right now. The last few books were pathetic.
Jul is a lot like the French or European Seth MacFarlane, He’s the creator of “The Darwinners”, “50 Shades of Greek”, and “Uh Oh Plato”, Don’t you think?
Have you realized how the eyes in Achde’s art looks like Dr. Seuss’ art a bit, I think Achde might of been inspired by Dr. Seuss when he was younger, or even read his books in his youth.
Translated in French that is.
This author is completely unknown in France, we have our own children’s authors.
Dr. Seuss is unknown in France, I thought he was known all over the world. And his books have been translated into many different languages all over the world.
The United States of America represents about 4% of the world population, so when I hear some US commenters stating that this american person or that american thing is the greatest in the world, I can’t help but sigh patronisingly and shake my head. America has a “World series” for a game no one else in the world bothers to play. Heck, the whole point of Augie’s blog is to demonstrate that America isn’t the center of the universe.
We have our own children’s books tailored to our culture and sensibilities. Not everyone knows who Beyonce, Oprah and Mister Rogers are. Most people actually don’t.