Review: With ‘Lucky Luke: Untamed’ Blutch Delivers A Perfect Modern Classic For A Classic

Blutch’s version of Morris’s cowboy who’s faster than his own shadow is everything you’d want – pure Lucky Luke with a Blutch twist.

I’ll be telling you and showing you all about it – all the art you see here is from Blutch’s Untamed and there’s plenty of it to show you – but I’ll warn you now, this one takes a long time to get to the point, wanders all around the houses, sees me reminiscing and indulging in absolute nostalgia, and eventually tells you that Lucky Luke: Untamed by Blutch is just a damn fine comic. You’ve been warned.

I first saw Lucky Luke when I was about 7/8. Every week I’d head to Dudley library to get another load of books, a weekly treat for a kid in love with reading.

Except my first stop was never the books. It was straight down into the kiddie section where they kept the oversized picture books. Because that was also where they kept the graphic novels. Of course, back then, graphic novels consisted of Asterix and Tintin and maybe a Raymond Briggs.

[As an aside, anything that was a big book with words and pictures went in with the kiddie picture books. Which was why I read Briggs’s Fungus The Bogeyman one week and his brilliant but very much not a kiddie book, When The Wind Blows, a tale of an elderly couple living and dying as the nukes exploded around them, another week. God bless you Dudley library for showing me that kids are capable of reading way beyond their years.]

But one day, alongside Herge, Goscinny & Uderzo, and Raymond Briggs, there was suddenly another name – Morris. Yes, that was a good day, the first time I saw Lucky Luke. I have no idea when it was, how old I was, who published it. But I can vividly remember how much I loved it. And dammit, I still do. Thank you Cinebook for doing the thing no one’s ever managed before and reprinting the entire series.

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As a kid I loved Lucky Luke. Loved the adventures, loved how those adventures were so bloody funny. Now I can still see how great they are, how funny they are. But I can also see how Luke’s creator Morris gave his all to it. Whether on his own or with the addition of Rene Goscinny, who really punched it up when he was working with Morris.

There was just so much going on, always funny, always clever, always full of adventure and gags. It’s just a masterpiece of doing the right thing, making it exciting, funny, and visually incredible.

Sure, the basics of it never change, every Lucky Luke album runs the same way, the basic DNA works the same, but that doesn’t matter. Like any classic of the type, it’s what the creative team do within that basic structure that adds the brilliance to it. And Morris could always do that.

The other thing I get now, implicitly rather than just taking it in as a kid, is Morris’s incredible skill as an artist, there in every panel and every page. His draughtsmanship is never less than superb, the penmanship, the way he puts the lines on the page, cartoonish yet still so expressive and full of emotion, energy, and power.

Okay, several hundred words into this, let’s get to the volume in question.

After Morris’s passing, the publishers decided to do something a little different with the character. But such is the greatness of Euro Comics that they actually did it right. If it was US comics it might have been something grim and gritty, nasty and against the spirit of the character. But no, instead they choose creators who just add to the Lucky Luke mythos and just add to the greatness.

They chose Matthieu Bonhomme (with Wanted, Lucky Luke) and The Man Who Shot Lucky Luke), Guillaume Bouzard (Jolly Jumper Stops Responding), Mawil (Lucky Luke Saddles Up), Ralf König (Swiss Bliss), and they choose Blutch. And they choose damn well. I mean, just look at this for Blutch giving us brilliance…

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I’ve covered one of Bonhomme’s volumes (The Man Who Shot Lucky Luke) already. It was really a revelation, showing just how much room to explore there was with the character, doing Luke in more serious fashion, a different artistic style, yet still nailing the essence of the character.

And now we have Blutch’s version of Morris’s Luke and it’s even better than Bonhomme’s take, totally getting everything that was great about the character and producing a beautifully crafter, absolutely stereotypical, yet in a very different style once more. It’s everything Morris did with Lucky Luke, it’s everything Goscinny added. It’s also very much Blutch and yet it’s everything that defines the character.

The tale is simple – they always were – just a series of comedic coincidences that build and build to a conclusion. Blutch gets that. Obviously gets that. He’s doing his version of Morris and it’s just the best thing.

Here in Untamed, everything begins with Luke marching a young ‘un into a sheriff’s office after he tried to steal Jolly Jumper. Job done, or so he thinks.

I was sold from the first page – the gags already hitting – just that ‘I admire your efficiency’ comment by Luke in response to the sheriff’s teetering pile of paperwork, that set it off perfectly for me…

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After this, everything happens so naturally, so comedically, as the coincidences, calamity, and confusion pile up and Luke’s quiet, ordered, simple life gets royally messed with before he, of course, sorts it all out.

A few miles down the road after dropping off Rufus Kinker Jr, Luke’s held up – for food – by a little girl and her brother, the youngest Kinkers.

Suddenly stuck with these two feral kids after the mysterious disappearance of their parents and their older brother Rufus now languishing in jail after that failed bit of horse-napping, we have everything in place for a quintessential Lucky Luke album of fun, adventuring, plentiful gags, and a particularly magnificent version of everyone’s favourite laconic cowboy.

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With the feral kids in tow, there’s plenty of time for more characters to join in the fun, more misadventures as Luke manages to get involved with the whole Kinker family and various crooks, all the while trying to find a way to offload the kids and make his escape.

The whole thing is, as always, as worked so very well for so many albums of great Euro comics, a series of set pieces as Luke goes from situation to situation, with Blutch hitting the mark time and time again.

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So. To sum up.

Lucky Luke is great.

Morris was a genius.

Handing the series over to others could have gone very wrong but it hasn’t.

And Blutch is a perfect choice to give us all a classic Lucky Luke that’s full of everything that made the strip so good, putting his own respectful twist on things.

This is just a brilliantly crafted, perfectly done, funny as hell, great Lucky Luke.

Now, let’s just go over the top with all this and just show you a hell of a lot of art from this one that shows you just how fabulous Blutch’s version of Lucky Luke really is.

Here’s one that really leaped out to me – Blutch doing his best Harvey Kurtzman… oh, that’s just so good…

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Seriously, let’s just zoom in on the first panel and see just what Blutch is bringing to this with the art…

First, Luke himself, with Blutch capturing, again, all of that fabulous kinetic look that Morris could always do so perfectly…

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And then a close-up of the tutting locals – which is where I’m really seeing that Kurtzman style, there’s just such a perfect looseness in Blutch’s linework here…

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Now, time to wrap it all up with another wonderful sequence to show you. Previously, trying to find some time to figure out just what’s going on with the Kinker family and do some investigating, he asked a friend from the saloon to do a little babysitting…

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Well, you can imagine how that goes down with the local conservative ladies. Despite Luke’s protests that there’s no way the kids are inside, he pops in to check for the old crones… and, as you’d expect, it all heads downhill from there…

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I do love those first three panels, the linework and comedic timing on display is just perfection. That first panel of Luke surrounded by the patrons of the saloon, showing the ladies outside that there’s no kids in here… beautiful…

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And then comes the perfection of the gag – the set-up of the ladies pointing something out to Luke’s own response… just magnificent…

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All of which leads, but of course, to a little bit of a bar fight. Just linger over the details of what Blutch has put into this one, it’s rather good…

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All of which leads us, dear reader, to one last image, one last gag to highlight why Untamed should be essential reading, of why Blutch on Lucky Luke is such a sublime choice of creator and character….

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Yes, Lucky Luke: Untamed by Blutch is a wonderful book, one that keeps the purity of the character, one where the artist sticks doggedly to the template created by the comic greats before him yet still stamps his own style all over things.

Now, hopefully, Cinebook have it in their plans for all the rest of these Lucky Luke By… homage volumes to be reprinted. I just can’t wait to see what Mawil, Guillaume Bouzard, and Ralf König come up with for the lonesome cowboy.

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LUCKY LUKE: UNTAMED – A HOMAGE TO MORRIS’S LONESOME COWBOY – by Blutch, colours by Daniel Blancou, Translated by Jerome Saincatin.

Published by Cinebook

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Okay, I said that image above was the last one, but hey, let’s end in the perfect fashion for a perfect book – over to Blutch and Luke one last time…