"The Burning Arrow" (Blake and Mortimer editions), which appears Friday, is the second part of a creation by Edgar P. Jacobs, "The U Ray", dating from 1943.

Jean Van Hamme was then a four-year-old Brussels resident caught up in the turmoil of the Second World War.

"My mother was dead and my father was resistant. So I lived with my grandmother, and I had an uncle who was barely 11 years older than me, and who subscribed to Bravo," he told AFP.

The teenager read to his nephew this weekly comic strip, whose edition in French was born at the end of 1940.

Belgian Flash Gordon

One of the cartoonists was Edgar P. Jacobs, rather novice in the 9th art. Initially responsible for illustrations of tales, he tried his version of the adventures of Flash Gordon, instead of comics that Belgium, under German control, could no longer import from the United States.

Censorship of too pro-American adventures? Fear of being accused of counterfeiting? This Belgian Flash Gordon stops in the middle of the war, and Edgar P. Jacobs begins a retrofuturistic account of his composition, mixing science fiction and prehistoric beasts, "The U Ray".

Belgian cartoonist Jean Van Hamme, March 10, 2023 in Paris © JOEL SAGET / AFP/Archives

For Jean Van Hamme's generation, "at four years old, a comic strip is revolutionary," he says. Especially this one, since "I had never seen a plane!"

"Le Rayon U" will not be published as an album until 1967, in black and white, and 1974 in color. Van Hamme, who in turn became a comic book author, rediscovered it with another look.

"I say to myself: we feel that Jacobs wrote this as he went along without knowing where he was going. It's completely kitsch," he said. "We don't know what the U-ray is, we don't know why it's called U, we don't know what it becomes, we don't know what happens to all the little flirts."

"Boring, the superhero"

Hence the idea, "three-four years ago", to make sense of this plot: "I really had the desire, for my pleasure, to make a sequel (...) They printed almost 150,000 copies. That was not the point. The goal was to have fun."

The result, this "Burning Arrow", detonates for our time, by taking up scripted springs straight from the 40s.

As in the films of the time where film is saved during action scenes, this disjointed aspect is cheerful, for the planetary struggle between the empire of Austradie, ruled by a tyrant, and the State of Norlandia.

"The intrigues were very simple. There were the bad guys and the good guys (...) There is a kind of ABC of fantasy, in this story, without there being a superhero. It's boring, the superhero: he can do anything," says the screenwriter.

In the drawing, we find the duo Étienne Schéder and Christian Cailleaux. The first, Belgian, knows Jacobs' style well, having contributed to four Blake and Mortimer albums since 2009. The second, French, collaborated with him for one of them, "Le Cri du Moloch" in 2020.

© 2023 AFP