Paris (AFP)
The next album of Lucky Luke, the lonely cowboy who "shoots faster than his shadow", will finally highlight the black Americans, announced Monday to AFP the scriptwriter of the series created more than 70 years by the Belgian Morris.
"The stories of Lucky Luke are supposed to take place during the American Civil War and beyond, yet African Americans are never represented in the albums, except in a marginal way", explained Jul, French screenwriter of the two previous albums of Lucky Luke, "La terre promise" (2016) and "Un cowboy à Paris" (2018).
Over the course of the 80 albums in the series, blacks make sporadic appearances, often speechless (the butler of the president in several albums, workers in "Going up the Mississippi" ...).
The album "A cowboy in cotton" (48 pages, 10.95 euros), drawn like the previous ones by Achdé, will be released on October 23 at Lucky Comics. "It was designed long before the death of George Floyd," said Jul.
The album cover shows Lucky Luke, gun in hand, in a cotton field alongside a black sheriff. In the background, we can see the disturbing figures of four members of the Ku Klux Klan with lit torches.
The story takes place in Louisiana. Lucky Luke inherited a huge cotton plantation and will have to fight against the powerful in the region and against racial segregation. He is, against all odds, supported by the Dalton and the Cajuns of the Bayou, these Whites left behind by the prosperity of the South.
But it is only thanks to the help of an astonishing figure of the Wild West that Lucky Luke will succeed in restoring justice: Bass Reeves, authentic but forgotten character who was the first black deputy sheriff west of the Mississippi.
Born into a slave family, Bass Reeves was considered one of the best triggers of his time. He has to his credit the arrest of more than 3,000 criminals.
Created by Morris in 1946, scripted by René Goscinny from the mid-1950s, Lucky Luke is one of the myths of Franco-Belgian comics. Since its creation, more than 300 million albums of the lone cowboy have been sold worldwide. The series is translated into 29 languages.
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