Cover detail by Morris to Lucky Luke v75: Rin Tin Can's Inheritance
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Lucky Luke v75: “Rin Tin Can’s Inheritance”

It’s the Lucky Luke story I never thought I’d see.

Putting aside the unfortunate issues that kept it out of print for so long — and we will get to those — it’s a strong story. In fact, it’s likely better than it’ll ever get credit for because of, again, those gnarly issues.

This is the story of how Lucky Luke came to be a ridiculously rich dog’s chaperone…

Credits Faster Than the Creators’ Shadow

Cover by Morris to Lucky Luke v75: Rin Tin Can's Inheritance

Writers: Rene Goscinny
Artist: Morris
Letterer: Design Amorandi
Translator: Jerome Saincaintin
Published by: Cinebook
Number of Pages: 48
Original Publication: 1973

What’s the Story?

Rin Tin Can, the Dalton’s dog in prison, inherits a batch of businesses in downtown Virginia City, Nevada. That city boomed after silver was found in local mines, making those businesses very lucrative. Lucky Luke is accompanying the dog to Virginia City to keep him safe and to be a trusted advisor, at the urging of the lawyers involved.

But here’s where things get complicated: If anything should happen to Rin Tin Can, then Joe Dalton becomes the heir. Now the Dalton Brothers have an urgent need to escape from prison to kill the dog. Then, Joe will be rich beyond his wildest dreams, the owner of several businesses in a town booming from a recent mine find.

Joe Dalton wants to kill Rin Tin Can for the inheritance

(We’ll put aside for the moment any concern about whether the law would actually work like this. Once Rin Tin Can is given control, his death would trigger his ownings to go to his heir, then, not the original owner’s second choice, right? But since Rin Tin Can arrives in the city in good health, Joe Dalton’s attempted murder of the dog should only land him more jail time, not a second hand inheritance.

Besides which, why does Joe Dalton want to become an entrepreneur? That’s too much work! Who wants employees in the Wild West?!?

Back now to the review, already in progress…

Lucky Luke is the only thing that stands between the heir dog and the next-in-line heir, the dangerous Joe Dalton.

Lucky Luke agrees to help Rin Tin Can and Virginia City

Oh, but that story is too easy, so Morris and Rene Goscinny add an extra layer to it: the dog thinks Lucky Luke is his captor and that Joe Dalton is his best friend. (OK, so the dog would likely name Joe his heir and my earlier parenthetical would be a moot point.)

It’s a crazy, mixed-up mess. Can a dog run a city? Will Lucky Luke be the shadow owner? Will the Daltons figure out a clean escape and kill both Lucky Luke and Rin Tin Can to set themselves up for a life of rich luxury?

Of course not, but Goscinny and Morris are going to make it a lot of fun getting there.

The Characters Get You There

For what is essentially a silly western comedy, there’s a lot of thought that goes into a book like this. It layers the humor in, solidly supported by a plot that’s based on authentic circumstances of the old west: Virginia City is a real place — there’s information on it at the back of the book — and it did have a major Chinatown area for all the underpaid labor that came from China to work in the area.

The history of Virginia City gets a short retelling

On top of that, the characters that populate the plot send it in directions you would never otherwise have guessed. Goscinny does an amazing job writing essentially dumb characters. He’s a smart guy; it takes a certain amount of mind-bending to see the world from another point of view in a way that makes sense to the character but absolutely none for the plot thread.

That’s the humor of the book. It centers on Rin Tin Can’s obliviousness to his own situation and the Daltons’ relentless, take-no-prisoners approach to finding and eliminating Rin Tin Can. The Dalton Brothers, of course, are naturally clueless, which they don’t recognize, making it even funnier.

Honestly, the Dalton Brothers are not my favorite part of the Lucky Luke canon. I know, that’s a heretical thing to say. I think, though, that they show up too often and don’t have enough depth to be interesting, but they’re always funny, anyhow. Goscinny turns their hapless, but earnest, desires into comedic gold. The Dalton Brothers are always fighting amongst themselves, one doing something dumber or more impulsive than the next. It might make them too easy a foe for Lucky Luke to defeat, but that’s where Goscinny’s skills as a writer come into play: He makes those situations interesting. In the hands of a lesser writer, this situations would be boring, paint-by-numbers playbook, with no variation.

You shouldn’t want to root for the Daltons or even care about them. There’s nothing even vaguely redeeming about them. But Goscinny sets them up to create fireworks in such a way that they drive the pages of the story that they’re on, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. To me, they’re holdovers from the Vaudeville comedy tradition, which is something I see a lot of in Goscinny’s work on “Asterix.” They don’t need to always make sense; they just need to be funny.

Lucky Luke doesn't WANT to be Rin Tin Can's legal guardian, but....

We also get a good look at Lucky Luke as a character in this book. He’s the Superman of the old west: He’s a big blue boy scout with an “aw, shucks” demeanor and the superhuman capacity to do good for people even in the hardest and craziest of circumstances. He’s not interested in helping the dog deal with his newfound wealth so much as he wants to help protect all the employees of those companies that the dog is suddenly in charge of. In fact, he pushes some initiatives to take care of the “little people” along the way.

He might not have any actual physical superpowers, but — no, wait, he can shoot faster than his own shadow. In the 1850s, that would be a power worth having.

That all said, there’s one last aspect of the book I need to touch on now. It’s a big one, and the reason Cinebook sat on this particular Morris/Goscinny album for so long.

Why Did Cinebook Print This Last?

It's Chinatown, Luke
It’s Chinatown, Luke

The one part of the story I’ve left out so far is another “antagonist” of sorts. There’s a population of workers from China living in the city. It’s an early example of a “Chinatown” inside a bigger city. This is based on historical accounts. Low paid Asian labor was used in the West to help build railroad tracks, work in the mines, etc.

That’s not a problem in and of itself. But the way Morris and Goscinny depict them is not in any way acceptable today.

We’ve seen this problem come up before, most notably in “Spirou in New York,” where the caricature of Asian people was, uhm, less than solid. That’s putting it mildly.

It’s the same problems here: Stereotypical, cliche, the worst of the worst, etc. The buck teeth, the squinty eyes, the yellow skin.

No, I’m not joking. They’re literally colored yellow in this book.

The unfortunate coloring choice for Chinese people in Lucky Luke by Goscinny and Morris

The coloring of “Lucky Luke” has always relied on flat colors to fill in large areas in layers, but the is an intentional effort to color the Chinese people yellow to set them apart. It’s far from subtle. And it’s just not something that is tolerable today.

A major running gag throughout the book, also, is the fear that the local Chinese residents eat dogs, so they’re just as likely to eat people they don’t like, too.

And I just about jumped out of my chair when I saw the word “Coolie” get used in this book. Yikes. To be fair, it’s used correctly in its original context of a laborer, but has since been considered a racial slur, specific to Asians. It’s easier — and better — to just avoid that bit of ugliness, to be honest.

The local racist calls Chinese people "Coolies" in Lucky Luke Rin Tin Can's Inheritance

Now, there are a couple of ways to look at this. The first is that these thoughts and words used by the locals in the book is a very accurate representation of what the people in towns like that thought of the Chinese people at the time. If nothing else, a story like this shows the reality of the situation. There’s always some level of thought like that in any large population with a sizable new minority. (“No Irish Need Apply” was once a thing, remember.) Ultimately, that depiction of the truth should win out over everything.

Also, the Chinese characters in the book aren’t actually violent towards the rest of the town. They’re shown as being productive members of the community. They tend to keep to themselves, perhaps, but they’re not eating their neighbors. It is a bit of a plot point that they would eat Rin Tin Can, though.

You can argue around that, if all else was equal. The problem is, Morris’ art is so flagrantly not right by today’s standards that it’s hard for many to give the benefit of the doubt in any other comparison. I understand that.

And, also, there’s this bit of dialogue:

The Dalton Bros affect bad Chinese accents

It’s not quite like Goscinny’s script has the Chinese characters doing the whole “Replace Every “L” with an “R”” thing. After all, these are white guys trying to imitate Chinese people and showing their own limited knowledge along the way. It’s perfectly in character. But that’s now how people are going to read it…

Goscinny made his career creating stories in Asterix that poke fun at various cultures for their national identities. That’s the whole basis of the “Asterix” series. It also comes up repeatedly in the “Lucky Luke” series, using real world events and locations to be the jumping off point for his stories.

And it’s something of a debate in the Asterix world. Goscinny and Uderzo, by today’s standards, are judged harshly for specific caricatures of specific people in some cases, but not others. What is OK to caricature and what isn’t? What gets a pass, and what’s the cause for shock and outrage? Is it ever consistently applied? The topic came up again with Papercutz’s recent reprinting of the series.

Obviously, the first reaction that jumps to many minds is, “This book is racist, shouldn’t exist, and must never be seen again.” And as bad as the depictions of the Chinese characters in this book are, I’m never a big fan of that. The book is, in some ways, a product of its time. To throw everything out for the small portion of the book that deals directly with the Chinese characters, would be a waste.

Cinebook prefaces the book with an editorial that explains why they waited so long to publish this book, what the issues with it are, and why it’s available now. It’s an explanation of Franco-Belgian society at the time of the book’s creation and an acknowledgement of what is wrong in the book – both then and now. It is presented in its proper historical context, and we can finally judge it for ourselves.

Yes, the caricatures and the attitudes shown in the book go too far. They’re not even necessary. There are minor rewrites that could have been done at the time to tell the same story without those tropes. The colors are easily fixed. The art, at the time, could have been toned down.

In fact, I’m surprised Cinebook presented the book as faithfully as they did. At the very least, I’d have thought they’d recolor the yellow skin of the Chinese characters, and maybe rewrite that one Dalton Brothers line of dialogue I showed above. It would take a little extra work, but it’s a lot more possible than redrawing every Chinese character, and could tone things down while still presenting the historical context. (Similarly, the Asterix reprints tone down the lip color on the African characters to help downplay them. It helps a tiny bit…)

It’s possible that the licensor wouldn’t allow that, or that profit margins on the books are so thin that even the relatively minor work of recoloring a bunch of pages would push the book into the red. I don’t know.

It’s an unfortunate situation that ruins an otherwise funny book, if you can set aside the obvious issues. I’m just glad it’s available for people to judge for themselves now.

The Art of Morris

Having said all that, I wanted to end this review on a bit of a more positive note:

Morris is an amazing artist. He would have been about 50 years old when he drew this book, featuring a character he created when he was 25. He had put the reps in at this point. He knew what he was doing.

What kept hitting me over and over again in this book was his storytelling, and the way he could compose a panel to make his point so seemingly effortlessly.

Lucky Luke discovers Rin Tin Can missing from his hotel room

There’s one point in the story where Lucky Luke walks into his hotel room to discover that Rin Tin Can wasn’t there. Morris uses the untouched room service lunch as the clue that nobody’s there, and composes the panel to lead your eye to Luke while featuring the lunch.

The Daltons discover Rin Tin Can missing from his hotel room

The situation repeats itself a short time later with the Dalton Brothers, and he makes the same point again using the same cues, but from a different angle.

Morris' Lucky Luke reverses directions in the story and in the panel to panel storytelling, as drawn by Morris

Going back to the Lucky Luke panel above, it’s followed by a tier of panels which shows Luke reversing directions to go after Rin Tin Can. Morris’ has Luke literally turn around, from looking left in the first panel to heading down and finally looking right on the far right panel. I love the way that works, guiding the eye and putting the idea into the reader’s mind that Luke is literally changing directions.

There’s also a sequence that follows all of that with Rin Tin Can wandering off on his own, lost in a very desolate area. It runs four pages, but it’s four fun pages of Morris doing a funny animal comic. I could do without the half page where he eats some mushrooms and trips out, but I imagine that was very timely humor in 1973. From here, it looks like a bad Dumbo-esque sequence. Or, as a personal preference, I just don’t get those sequences….

But to see Morris doing mostly dog pantomime for a few pages is a lot of fun, and a real highlight of the book, especially so since there are no other larger issues weighing it down…

Recommended?

Yes. Maybe not for the kids, unless you’re planning on sitting down with them and having a talk about it. It is, from a 2020 perspective, quite frustrating. This is a great book that would be very acceptable in modern times with a few changes, many of them quite subtle and easy. But that’s not how things happened in the 1970s. Dammit.

I’m sure there’s more of this to consider, of course. “Lucky Luke” is a book set in the 1800s. I’m sure every album depicting an American Indian would likely be placed under a similar microscope for its views and images.

One Last Thing….

Lucky Luke, amused by the Daltons, is still smoking a cigarette....

Lucky Luke is still smoking cigarettes in this book! Morris wouldn’t remove that from the seres for another decade or more…. I still laugh, though, when the content warnings of a television show including “smoking.”

From a character point of view, I also love this panel. You can see how sure of himself the Dalton Brother is, and how amused Lucky Luke is by the whole situation. You can tell Luke is just going through the motions, knowing how inept the Daltons are and how easily he’ll be able to turn the tables. With that smile, Luke looks like he’s just having fun with the whole thing.

And so are we.

Lucky Luke v75: Rin Tin Can’s Inheritance

Great book, but flawed from a modern perspective.

Augie De Blieck Jr.

Summary

This is a great book that would be very acceptable in modern times with a few changes, many of them quite subtle and easy. But that’s not how things happened in the 1970s. Dammit.

4

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

21 Comments

  1. One thing to point out is the brief cameo of Mark Twain on pg 13.

    The hallucination sequence is one of my favorite page from a Luke album. It’s pure Morris at his finest and funniest (Rantanplan popping out of the cake seems to reference Luke doing the same in “Dalton City” just a few albums back).

    I gotta say: what is your favorite part of the Lucky Luke cannon?

  2. Excellent write-up! This one is also something of a personal favorite, despite the problems mentioned in the review. Regarding the heading “Why did Cinebook print this last?”, it should be noted that Cinebook still has not published Travelling Up The Mississippi, a Goscinny LL-album originally published in 1961 which is even more problematical than Rin Tin Can’s Inheritance by today’s standards. I guess it is the only Goscinny album which still has not seen publication in english.

    1. Yes, Traveling Up The Mississippi will be coming out next year in 2021 by Cinebook as Steaming Up The Mississippi, and will be Cinebook’s 79th Lucky Luke book.

      1. Which is in honor of Steaming Up The Mississippi’s 60th birthday, and you know, it’s also Lucky Luke’s 75th birthday too, you know.

    1. In original French language order, Rintincan’s Inheritance would be the 41st book in the Lucky Luke series.

  3. Is there a particular intent on your part, Augie, to discuss the caricatures in this book at precisely the time that certain other caricatures once again make headlines over here in a tragic fashion, in conjunction with the Charlie trial well under way in Paris?
    As you point out, this book was written and drawn in the early seventies, so obviously sensibilities were different at the time and when I first read it as a kid, depiction of the asian characters didn’t bother me at all, or anyone I know for that matter, first of all because that type of book is a cartoon where all character traits are exaggerated, the undertaker looks like a vampire, the bartender, the saloon dancers, etc. It’s kind of expected. The term coolie used here is the same in the french version and in line with what you could hear in John Wayne movies that I was seeing on french TV at the time. Or any Charlie Chan or Fu Manchu or Bruce Lee movie from the same era,.So nothing shocking there, either.
    What might be a bit more problematic is that in translating this for an american audience, obviously, this particular series hits closer to home. This might be a bit more touchy for current americans than it was for 70s french kids. Since the translation was only done recently, I’d be curious to hear from Jerome about some of the rationales behind those choices.

    For different reasons, my personal feelings about this book are mixed. The Rin Tin Can (Rantanplan in the french version)-centric stories have always been my least favourites of the LL books, because it is very hard to properly write stupid characters, and in my opinion the plot ends up being so contrived by the stupidity and loses interest for me. Even for a writer as gifted as Goscinny is, that’s a bit of a stretch. I tolerate the Daltons, even though they are one-dimensional, extremely predictable and over-used. Sadly for me, this is about the time that this dumb dog became insanely popular in the series and started showing up more and more. He even ended up getting his own spinoff series of albums, which I happily skipped.

  4. I agree that the visuals of the Chinese people is horrible and did not age well, but dubious dog eating jokes aside, they are at least presented as generally decent characters. I’d say the Daltons are more offensive with the race part in how they act.

    Overall tho, Lucky Luke doesn’t fall into racist tropes too much. Yes most racial features are usually the obvious cartoony caricatures, but the characters usually are not. Main case in point: considering how often Natives or “Indians” appear in the series, they are rarely seen as the usual western “savage”, whether they be allies or enemies. Rather they shown to be noble or devious, smart or dumb, peaceful or violent, as each story dictates.
    If anything, they mostly are just generic “Indians”, I don’t recall there being much effort to show differences between the various Native Tribes.

    That said, I think L’Heritage de Ran Tan Plan is one of the funnier books in the series, just because it’s so ridiculous.

    I’d also agree that the Daltons are probably overused, just as much as the Joker or Venom would be on the American side, and likely for similar reasons: that they sell well when they appear.

  5. Judging by the description of the upcoming album “A Cowboy in High Cotton”, the Daltons will also be part of the plot. You just can’t keep away from those boys.

  6. Yeaaaah, we were fully expecting this sort of reactions (though in fairness, we also feared it’d be more vociferous!)

    All right, here’s a quick response to your questions. I imagine it won’t make everyone happy, but that’s pretty much the nature of the beast here …

    We hesitated to publish this one for a LONG time. We decided to do it, and we knew it would need an introduction. We couldn’t correct all the problems – too complicated, too costly – so instead we decided to talk about them directly, and make this book a sort of learning opportunity, if you will. It’s a fun and funny book, sure, but why not also expose some serious dysfunctions of our societies? It’s not like we don’t need it these days …

    At that point, we also figured that for maximum impact, we might as well NOT modify anything. That it’d be better for anyone reading that introduction to see the full extent of what we meant, the full extent of what was deemed acceptable in 1970 …
    So, no changing the skin colour, and no (extensive) toning down of the language. This is it. This is what we, as a society, were glibly saying and drawing just 50 years ago, even perfectly nice and intelligent people. This is what the older ones among us – me included – grew up in. Like JC said, this sort of depiction didn’t bother me back then, or anyone I knew – but then again, I also realised much later I never knew any Asian people who read it. I never got THEIR opinion, or heard about their daily experience of being treated a bit like that for real.

    This might also mean that we made a mistake here, by not toning things down. Maybe we miscalculated. We’re happy to listen to our readers’ opinions and advice, and we’ll take it into account in case of a reprint, or for other titles.

    Anyway, that was our reasoning, for better or for worse.

    J. Saincantin, Cinebook translator

    1. Makes sense to me. Thanks Jerome for your feedback. Every work of art is a testimonial of the time period it was produced in. As always context is key. Tintin au Congo tells of Belgium’s colonial past, the Banania illustrations, Uncle Ben’s, etc. Seeing malicious intent everywhere is never healthy. Judging Yesterday’s fine arts masterpieces with today’s Facebook guidelines is moronic, so is taking everything at face value for the sake of outrage. Sadly there is no vaccine for that. Catering to idiots by putting a disclaimer in front of Gone With The Wind, in which Rhett Butler is overtly disparaging southerners, is just as bad because it’s pandering to the cancel culture.

    2. I salute you for publishing the comic as it was, with the context to make it understandeable to new generations and Americans who are a bit more uppity about appearances than us Europeans.

      In France and Belgium such caricatures aren’t as strongly opposed, it is more the roles of the figures that matter. The depiction of African people in Tintin au Congo is object to much (justified) critique as they behave like dumb, naive children there to be colonized. Moulinsart, the publisher, refuses to put on a context page before, which is a huge miss, especially since Hergé would later really grow out of these colonialistic views and come to regret having had them.
      Similar depictions, with the big lips and all, made in later or other comics don’t come with that critique as the roles are much more positive (see: the slaves in Asterix and the mansions of the gods. They may be depicted visually with all the now seen as racist cues, but in-story are shown to be people in a bad spot, with humour, intelligence, and skills. Or Taka Takata by Jo-El Azara, set in Japan, buckteeth galore but with a surprising understanding of culture in the stories). It went on for longer than in other cultures as it was seen as just ways to caricature other people, just the same way white people would be caricatured with giant noses and ears black people would be very black indeed with giant lips and asians with buckteeth and yellow skin. It’s still present, really.

      A more modern example of context is the blackfaced servant of St. Nicholaus in Belgium. His only role is to serve him, and he’s a very controversed figure, as, again, context! shows him to have no agency of his own.

  7. If you do the Lucky Luke agenda next year in 2021 in honor of Lucky Luke’s 75th birthday, will you do a redux of all the Lucky Luke books you’ve reviewed so far on this website?

    1. Only if I had something new to say about those books that reading all the others taught me.

      I think the most likely thing to happen is that I’ll review Lucky Luke books from time to time here — or even in batches — and eventually make my way through all of them. After the fact, I’ll put together a special page to link to all the reviews and pretend like it was a planned Lucky Luke Agenda all along. 😉

      1. You know, as I said in the comments section of your review of Lucky Luke 7 Stories, that next year in 2021 is Lucky Luke’s 75th birthday.

      2. How can you pretend like it was a planned Lucky Luke Agenda? Will it not be like The Asterix Agenda or, Valerian and Laureline Project, or the Frnck Project you did?

  8. Speaking of Mark Twain and Lucky Luke, Achde and Jul referenced Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the newest Lucky Luke adventure “A Cowboy In High Cotton”. And they also make an appearance in the book.

    1. Both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn appear in the part after the book tells the story of slavery and black people in the US until 1865 when slavery was abolished in the US the same year of the end of the American Civil War. And both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fall out of a tree when Lucky Luke and his horse, Jolly Jumper are camping out for the night and camp out with Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper by the campfire and sleep with Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper for the night.

  9. Did you know that the composer for the Lucky Luke movies Daisy Town from 1971 and The Ballad of The Daltons from 1978 Claude Bolling died yesterday at the age of 90 years old? And also, Arthur Berckmans better known as Berck died 3 days ago at the age of 91 years old. Berck was well known for a series called Strapontin with Rene Goscinny and then Jacques Acar at Tintin magazine. And also did Sammy with Raoul Cauvin at Spirou magazine from 1970 until his early retirement at the age of 65 years old in 1994. And after Berck retired, Jean-Pol (aka Jean-Pol Van Den Broeck) took over Sammy until the 40th and final book came out in 2009. And another series Berck did at Spirou magazine was Mulligan about an Irish American towboat captain which became the basis for Sammy.