“All his life he drew the same horses, the same canyons, the same rocks, the same cabins, the same blades of grass, the same pistols, the same ghost towns. Each object, setting or character are like letters and punctuations of a grand narrative that goes beyond us and spans decades.” It’s Hervé Di Rosa who speaks, like the host of artists invited to speak about Morris and his favorite hero, Lucky Luke.
Their links with “the man who shoots faster than his shadow” are highlighted in the book which accompanies the exhibition. 100 years 100 works at the Huberty & Breyne gallery in Brussels, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the Belgian author. On a museum scale, this retrospective is an event by shedding light on Morris’s graphic evolution over nearly fifty years and by revealing 15 original covers that have remained in the family sphere until now, as well as previously unpublished sketches. If the exhibition is non-commercial, Morris’ heirs have still agreed to an auction of ten original drawings by the creator, unrelated to his favorite hero and coming from the family archives, scheduled at the Brussels gallery on December 19 at 7 p.m. hours.
Born in Courtrai (Belgium) in 1923 and died in 2001, Maurice De Bevere, alias Morris, studied law before falling into the pot of the ninth art – a term which he subsequently popularized. He took classes with Jean Image and then joined the Compagnie Belge d’Actualités cartoon studio. Requested by the weekly The mosquito from 1945, the illustrator created 250 front pages for this humorous magazine, while sketching the contours of his poor lonesome cowboywhose first adventures appeared in 1946 in theSpirou Almanac 1947under the title Arizona 1880. Thus was born the long-term craze for Lucky Luke, flanked by his mount, the pragmatic Jolly Jumper, and the stupidest dog in the West, Rantanplan, immutable companions joined by emblematic figures of the western: the Daltons, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane or even Lulu Carabine and her girls. So many characters served by the designer who refines, over the albums, the efficiency and extreme precision of his line.
Maurice De Bevere (Morris), creator of “Lucky Luke”, here in 1984.
/ © Ullstein Bild Dtl
Morris’ stay across the Atlantic strongly contributed to this graphic mutation. Between 1948 and 1955, he traveled across America with his studio friends, Franquin, the mentor, and Jijé (Joseph Gillain). In New York, he meets the gang of Mad – the satirical magazine dedicated to comics hosted by Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis and Wallace Wood -, but also the screenwriter René Goscinny, with whom he worked closely until the latter’s death in 1977.
The complicity between the two men works wonders: the silhouette of Lucky Luke lengthens, while the trigger-happy brawler softens, until he adopts, in the mid-1950s, imperturbable elegance and full empathy. humor that will go down in posterity. On paper, the bubbles click like so many cinematographic shots suggesting, in a frame stripped of all unnecessary artifice, the action being taken. Morris’ passion for the big screen is a key element of the saga, brought to life with his feature films Daisy Town (1972), The Ballad of the Daltons (1978), The Daltons on the run (1983), without forgetting the lucky Luke directed and played in 1991 by Terence Hill, who donned the vigilante’s outfit the following year in the Italian television series of the same name.
To date, the cowboy’s tribulations include nearly 90 albums, translated into around thirty languages and with a circulation of several hundred million copies. And if a single image were to sum up Morris’s visual genius, it would be that, infinitely replicated, on the back covers, where the hero places a bullet in the heart of his shadow before it even has time to draw.