Paris (AFP)
Belgian writer Henri Vernes, who died Sunday at the age of 102, was the father of Bob Morane, the hero with nerves of steel and magnetic gaze in a series of over 200 novels which was a great success of adventure and comic book literature.
Endowed with a fertile imagination, Henri Vernes kept, throughout his life, the passion for writing and the pleasures of life, with a malice and an energy that made us forget his great age.
"I would still like to write a hundred books, court a few ladies and for the rest I leave everything to the lot," he declared to the French-speaking radio and television channel RTBF on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
- "The Adventurer" -
From the 1960s, the novels were adapted into comics by the author himself with drawings by Belgian Gérald Forton, and Bob Morane was honored by the French rock group Indochine, in 1982 in the hit "L'Aventurier" .
Originally created for young readers of the Marabout editions, the character of Bob Morane quickly seduced a much larger audience and largely inspired the future parents of many adventure heroes, often for the cinema, such as Indiana Jones.
Almost 40 million copies of Bob Morane books have been sold.
Charles-Henri Dewisme, his real name, was born in Ath, in Wallonia (south), on October 16, 1918. From the age of 18, he preferred to travel, especially in China, rather than study with the Jesuits in Tournai.
Back in Europe, he worked for the Belgian and English secret services during the war, was a journalist in Paris, a correspondent for a Lille daily and an American press agency.
"I attended Saint-Germain-des-Près and I made Juliette Gréco dance, it didn't go any further," he joked.
After a few texts which cannot find publishers, in 1953 he signs his first Bob Morane ("The Infernal Valley", where the hero fights in New Guinea against formidable emerald traffickers).
The success is immediate, the Morane adventure begins ... Some years, a book comes out every two months.
The covers are neat.
Sometimes they take the reader to parallel worlds, to science fiction.
After the bankruptcy of Marabout in 1978, the series continued elsewhere but sales fell.
However, the author perseveres.
In 2009, according to the site "bobmorane.fr" appeared the last, number 222, "Alerte aux V1".
- The honors of comics -
Gray eyes and brush hair, 1m85, Bob Morane was invariably 33 years old.
He was French, ex-squadron commander, hero of the Battle of Britain, did not lack composure.
He was a martial arts specialist, a fearless vigilante against pirates, space monsters, the disturbing Miss Ylang-Ylang or her nemesis, the Yellow Shadow.
There was no sex - a taboo theme in children's literature - in these fairly well-written books, where it was not uncommon to come across, here and there, an imperfect subjunctive.
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Widely translated (including in Russian and Japanese), the adventures of Morane and his pal, a beefy red-haired whiskey lover, the aptly named Bill Ballantine, will never know the honors of the big screen, unlike James Bond, another hero of post-war.
On the other hand, the comic strip, in his Belgian kingdom, seized very early on a hero born on his land: in 1959, Bob Morane was adapted with "The fire bird", drawn by Dino Attanasio.
A variation which will be followed by 72 others under the pencil of Gerald Forton, William Vance - the designer of XIII - and Coria.
Henri Vernes also created in the 1980s a naughty series, "Don", where the hero's adventures always end in bed.
This great reader of American black novels finally wrote a number of fictions under different pseudonyms (Gaston Bogard, Jacques Colombo, Lew Shannon etc).
In 2012, he signed his Memoirs.
This pen marathoner lived in the Brussels municipality of Saint-Gilles, surrounded by masks, statuettes or paintings brought back from his travels.
"It may seem strange but I never dreamed of Bob Morane. I wrote, I delivered my texts and I immediately forgot them. But, thanks to him, I had the means to live well," he said. in 2012.
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