Moebius: Tangled up in Blueberry • Tom Lennon

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Moebius: Tangled up in Blueberry

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The legendary French comics artist Jean Giraud (1938-2012) was better known as Moebius, and under that enigmatic alter-ego he bent minds and burned retinas for nearly half a century. His classic strips like Arzach, The Incal and The Edena Cycle were beautifully illustrated and relentlessly idiosyncratic works that continue to be discussed by his many fans in hushed, reverential tones. His influence can be found in graphic design, movies, novels and even the catwalks of the world’s fashion capitals. He’s an undisputed comics industry A-lister who managed to get himself admitted into this very select club despite already being a member.

Giraud had already made his name as a successful cartoonist long before Moebius revolutionised comics in the 1970s. Under another pseudonym – ‘Gir’ – he produced comics so vastly different from the work of Moebius that they could almost have been created by a different artist. Where Moebius’ illustrations were loose and spontaneous, Gir’s were tight and meticulously rendered. While Moebius sculpted hitherto unseen vistas with his seemingly limitless imagination, Gir anchored his stories to a gritty, authentic depiction of the past. And just as Moebius explored personal, esoteric themes by subverting the visual language of science-fiction and fantasy, Gir produced a series of classic, page-turning adventure yarns set in the American Old West. By the late-1960s he was widely recognised as one of the Western genre’s finest comic artists, an achievement made possible thanks to a young, undisciplined cavalry officer that went by the name of Mike S. Blueberry.

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For the uninitiated, Lieutenant Blueberry was a comic book Spaghetti Western – a Soufflé Western, if you will – that, like its cinematic counterpart, reinvigorated that most American of genres. Like the Dollars Trilogy of Sergio Leone, it breathed new life into familiar tropes by presenting a gritty, revisionist depiction of the Old West that was shot through with European sensibilities. Created in 1963 by Giraud and the veteran comics writer Jean-Michel Charlier (1924-1989), Blueberry made his debut in the classic French anthology title Pilote and his adventures were subsequently chronicled in a series of 28 albums, from 1963s Fort Navajo to 2005’s Dust. Beside the main series, the character appeared in two significant spin-off titles – Young Blueberry and Marshall Blueberry – that featured Giraud and Charlier working with other talented writers including François Corteggiani, William Vance and Colin Wilson.

In Giraud’s native France, Blueberry has remained his most popular series, stubbornly outselling the titles penned by his more illustrious alter-ego. In fact, the character’s appeal went beyond the traditional bande dessinées audience, with later volumes serialised in the daily newspaper Le Monde and in the weekly news magazine L’Express.

In contrast, for many Anglo-American comic fans, Blueberry represents a weird, incongruous entry in Moebius’ otherwise exemplary oeuvre. They dismiss the strip as a generic prelude to Giraud’s more ambitious, more interesting work. While Moebius’s art was characterised by vivid imagery and dizzying inventiveness, Gir’s art on Blueberry represented a workmanlike adherence to traditional storytelling techniques. With Blueberry, Giraud learnt his craft; as Moebius, he evolved into an artist.

So, does Blueberry deserve to be anything more than a footnote in a great man’s career? Is it just an anomaly whose continued popularity amongst the French is not dissimilar to their inexplicable fondness for Jerry Lewis, cheese and bureaucracy?

As another much-maligned Western icon might have put it: ‘The Hell it is.’

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Blueberry made his debut in 1963, the same year as JFK got shot, Profumo got busted and The Amazing Spider-Man first hit the spinner-racks. Charlier was an established comics veteran, a ‘founding father’ of the Silver Age of Franco-Belgian comics, while Giraud was just a young artist struggling to make a name for himself. Already a precocious talent, he’d made his professional debut at the sickeningly tender age of 17, illustrating The Adventure of Frank and Jeremie for Far West magazine [1956]. Over the next few years he worked on various titles like Ames Vaillantes and Coeur Vaillantes, spent a year in the army, then served an apprenticeship under Europe’s premier illustrator of Western comics, Joseph ‘Jije’ Gillian.

While Giraud worked mainly in Westerns, Charlier, by contrast, ‘never felt much empathy for that genre’, and when Giraud pitched a new idea for a cowboy strip to him in 1961 he politely declined. A reporting assignment to California’s Mojave Desert, though, changed Charlier’s mind. As with Krazy Kat’s George Herriman 50 years earlier, the rugged, otherworldly ambience of the American West inspired him artistically: ‘I...