Lieutenant Blueberry

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Comic
title Lieutenant Blueberry
Original title Lieutenand Blueberry
country France
author Jean-Michel Charlier
Jean Giraud
Illustrator Jean Giraud
publishing company Dargaud
magazine Pilots
First publication 1963-1990

Lieutenant Blueberry is a Franco-Belgian comic .

action

The hero of the stories, Mike Steve Blueberry (actually Mike Steve Donovan ), first meets the reader as a lieutenant in the US Army in the Wild West, where he has to face dangerous adventures during the Indian Wars. Blueberry is an undisciplined adventurer who loves to drink and play, and his superiors struggle to keep the regulations of the army. Later he has to protect the railway construction across the west and as an undercover desperado goes on a search for a lost treasure in Mexico . In a number of adventures, Blueberry gets the soldier of fortune Red Neck as a supporting actor and - as a comic element of the series - the unreliable gold digger and drunkard Jimmy McClure . In addition, numerous historically documented characters find their place in the fictional stories of Blueberry, including George A. Custer , Wyatt Earp , Ulysses Grant , Doc Holliday , Benito Juárez , Abraham Lincoln , Cochise and Geronimo .

meaning

Jean-Michel Charlier introduced the rebellious hero of the Nouvelle Vague to Western comics with the character Blueberrys . It is no coincidence that the facial features of the comic figure are initially cut according to the real model of Jean-Paul Belmondo . In the first stories, the adventures of Blueberry are still caught in the usual clichés of the American cavalry western, but the series follows the development of the western genre pre-drilled in the cinema : at the latest with the two-album story about the 'forgotten goldmine' ( First published in 1969/1970 in Pilote ) the influence of the spaghetti westerns is also reflected on Blueberry, who no longer fits the scheme of the sleek and sleek western heroes of the 1950s and 1960s, but with his attitude and appearance the stubbly, unkempt characters of the Transferring spaghetti westerns into comics. This change is accompanied by the abandonment of the rapprochement with Belmondo: Blueberry, who in contrast to many other comic book heroes also ages significantly in the course of the series, is increasingly getting 'own' facial features and the resemblance of the old Blueberry to the aged actor is only marginal.

This aging of the title character (and the rest of the characters spanning the series) is another notable element of the series. While other comic heroes remain at a fixed age (the aged Methusalix never dies at Asterix, nor does Tim ever grow up; the western hero Lucky Luke defies historical and chronological classification), Blueberry's appearance and demeanor in the most recent albums match carefully to his actual age (he was born on October 30, 1843); a phenomenon that can only be observed in a few characters in comics.

The complex stories usually stretch over a cycle of three to five albums; as a result, secondary threads and characters in the stories also come into their own. Blueberry's positive attitude towards the Indians , which the series depicts reasonably appropriately historically, does not correspond from the beginning to the cliché image of the malevolent red skin, but rather to a more nuanced Indian image , as it is in the Hollywood film since The Broken Arrow (1950) or earlier can be found in the literature by James Fenimore Cooper , Gabriel Ferry and Karl May .

Jean Giraud has visually broken the series away from his role model Jijé and completed it with realistic mastery. However, the representation of the main character Blueberry is graphically unclear and variable until the 1970s. It was only with the album "General Gelbhaar", in which Blueberry's sidekick Jimmy McClure took on his unmistakable shape, that Mike Blueberry gained his own unique comic character. With Colin Wilson , William Vance and Michel Blanc-Dumont , other first-class illustrators have taken over the offshoots of the series.

Publications

Blueberry was created in 1963 for the French comic magazine Pilote , initially under the series title Fort Navajo . The adventures were then published in album form by Dargaud. In Germany, the series made its debut in the magazine MV-Comix of Ehapa- Verlag, where the first episode was published (MV 47/1968 to 3/1969). From 1972 to 1980 the series ran in ZACK magazine and the short stories in the Zack Parade paperback published by Koralle-Verlag . It has been published by Ehapa Verlag since 1979 , first in the series Die große Edel-Western , then from 1989 as an album series and from April 2006 in an elaborately designed edition - the Blueberry Chronicles . In November 2019, a new complete edition in the original coloring, the Collector's Edition , started at the Egmont Comic Collection .

Album editions

First cycle - Fort Navajo:

  • 1965: Fort Navajo ( Fort Navajo , Pilote, 1963–1964, 46 pages)
  • 1966: Riots in the West ( Tonnerre à l'ouest , Pilote, 1964, 46 pages)
  • 1967: The lonely eagle ( L'aigle solitaire , Pilote, 1964–1965, 46 pages)
  • 1968: The half-blood ( Le cavalier perdu , Pilote, 1965, 46 pages)
  • 1969: The trail of the Navajos ( La piste des Navajos , Pilote, 1965–1966, 46 pages)

Single volume:

  • 1969: The Sheriff ( L'homme à l'étoile d'argent , Pilote, 1966, 47 pages)

Second cycle - the iron horse:

  • 1970: The iron horse ( Le cheval de fer , Pilote, 1966–1967, 46 pages)
  • 1970: Steelfingers ( L'homme au poing d'acier , Pilote, 1967, 46 pages)
  • 1971: The track of the Sioux ( La piste des Sioux , Pilote, 1967–1968, 46 pages)
  • 1971: General Gelbhaar ( Général tête jaune , Pilote, 1968, 48 pages)

Third cycle - Marshal Blueberry:

  • 1991: On orders from Washington
  • 1993: Sherman Mission
  • 2000: Bloody Frontier

Fourth cycle - the forgotten gold mine:

  • 1972: The forgotten gold mine ( La mine de l'allemand perdu , Pilote, 1969, 46 pages)
  • 1972: The ghost with the golden balls ( Le specter aux balles d'or , Pilote, 1970, 52 pages)

Fifth cycle - the southern gold:

  • 1973: Chihuahua Pearl ( Chihuahua Pearl , Pilote, 1970–1971, 46 pages)
  • 1973: The Man Who Is Worth $ 500,000 ( L'homme qui valait $ 500,000 , Pilote, 1971, 46 pages)
  • 1974: Ballade for a coffin ( Ballade pour un cercueil , Pilote, 1972, 62 pages)

Sixth Cycle - The Conspiracy:

  • 1974: Vogelfrei ( Le hors la loi , Pilote, 1973, 44 pages)
  • 1975: Angel Face ( Angel Face , Tintin, 1975, 46 pages)

Seventh cycle - Tsi-Nah-Pah:

  • 1980: Broken nose ( Nez cassé , Zack, 1978–1979, 47 pages)
  • 1980: The long march ( La longue marche , Zack, 1980, 46 pages)
  • 1982: The ghost tribe ( La tribu fantôme , L'Écho des Savanes, 1981, 46 pages)

Eighth cycle - the end of the road:

  • 1983: The last card ( La dernière carte , Spirou, 1983, 46 pages)
  • 1986: The way to freedom ( Le bout de la piste , 46 pages)

Single volume:

  • 1990: Arizona Love ( Arizona Love , 56 pages)

Ninth cycle - Mister Blueberry:

  • 1995: Mister Blueberry
  • 1997: Shadows over Tombstone
  • 1999: Geronimo the Apache
  • 2003: OK Corral
  • 2005: Dust
  • 2007: Apaches (summarized, partially expanded, but also abridged version of various flashbacks from previous albums in the cycle)

Short stories

In 1968, Super Pocket Pilot, the paperback edition of Pilote , first published a short story about Fort Navajo. Jean-Michel Charlier then wrote the next eight short stories in which one learns more about the origins and experiences of the young Blueberry during the civil war. The drawings were by Jean Giraud . Dargaud summarized the short stories in three albums. In the German-speaking area, Ehapa took over the publication of the albums. A special volume in paperback format was also published. In the Blueberry Chronicles of Ehapa , the short stories appeared in a complete edition. A separate series was created with The Youth of Blueberry .

  • Donner über der Sierra ( Tonnerre sur la Sierra , 1968, 14 pages)
  • Blueberry's secret ( Le secret de Blueberry , 1968, 16 pages)
  • The Chattanooga Bridge ( Le pont de Chattanooga , 1969, 16 pages)
  • 3000 Mustangs ( 3000 mustangs , 1969, 16 pages)
  • Ritt in den Tod ( Chevauchée vers la mort , 1969, 16 pages)
  • Manhunt ( Chasse à l'homme , 1969, 16 pages)
  • Soldier MS Blueberry ( Private MS Blueberry , 1970, 16 pages)
  • Hunting for life and death ( Chasse à l'homme , 1970, 16 pages)
  • Double game ( Double jeu , 1970, 16 pages)

Movie

In 2004, the film Blueberry and the Curse of the Demons was directed by Dutchman Jan Kounen, and is only loosely related to the character. Vincent Cassel took the title role . Among other things, Blueberry is shown neither as an officer nor as a member of the cavalry in the film . Among other things, he has relationships with Indians in the film and tries to gain knowledge through trance and the use of drugs. The other cast mostly consists of renowned genre actors such as Michael Madsen , Temuera Morrison , Colm Meaney , Tchéky Karyo , the Oscar nominees Juliette Lewis and Djimon Hounsou as well as the Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine .

literature

  • Erik Svane, Martin Surmann, Alain Ledoux, Martin Jurgeit, Gerhard Förster, Horst Berner: Blueberry and the European Western comic. Zack dossier 1 . Mosaik-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-932667-59-X .
  • Daniel Pizzoli: A Yankee named Blueberry. («Il était une fois Blueberry»). Delta-Verlag, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-7704-0558-7 .
  • Michael Hüster: Blueberry, the long way to Tombstone, 40 years of western myth , three-part series of articles in The Speech Bubble # 192, 194–195

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Master of Strange at spiegel.de
  2. ^ Andreas C. Knigge : Comic Lexikon, Ullstein 1988, p. 223
  3. ↑ Kira Ackermann: The anti-hero in western comics of the Franco-Belgian school, Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München 2010, p. 6/7
  4. ↑ The Wild West made him grow gray hair: "Blueberry" on faz.net
  5. ^ Review of Collectors Edition 1 at splashcomics.de
  6. ↑ Blueberry Collector's Edition 1 at comicgate.de
  7. ↑ The original editions in chronological order
  8. ^ Front page of Jijé
  9. ↑ pp. 26–36 of Jijé
  10. ↑ Pages 17–38 by Jijé
  11. ↑ Album issues 1–3 (French)
  12. ↑ Album editions 17, 19–20 (Ehapa)
  13. ↑ Special issue (Ehapa)
  14. ↑ Complete edition 1, 6 (Ehapa)
  15. ↑ The stories in chronological order
  16. ^ Text by Jean Giraud