prairiemary: COWBOY COMIC STRIPS: RICK O'SHAY, LUCKY LUKE AND BLUEBERRY

My hero is a comic strip character in a strip called “Rick O’Shay.” Rick was the lovable sheriff in a small cowboy town of the nineteenth century called Conniption.. But he wasn’t my REAL hero though I was fond of him. My REAL “hero” was his buddy, “Hipshot Percussion” who was a little on the dark side. Rick was frankly Christian and went to church with his girl friend who was the teacher at the one-room school. Hipshot was a renegade if not an outlaw, and his church was the Great Outdoors. He and Rick were best friends.

This comic strip was a version of the Westerns on television that everyone loved so much in the Fifties. I took them (in my later thinking years) as “stand-down stories” -- that is, situations that tried to understand the transition from battlefield heroism to the heroism of a dad with a family and a job.

The real hero behind “Rick O’Shay” was Stan Lynde, a real person who only recently died. Stan had a helluva time with his life in spite of the efforts of a series of wives. I never pried. At a time in my life when I was a bit of an outcast and troublemaker myself but still attending the Montana convocations of artists and writers, Stan -- tall and handsome -- would deliberately come and sit by me. We didn’t say much. It was a felt heroism.

This idea was confirmed yesterday when I bought a copy of “Cowboys and Indians” magazine to read at the laundromat. It had a story about “Lucky Luke,” a Belgian version of this same sort of comic strip that hit it “unlucky” in the USA, but was a great success in the rest of the world. It’s more cartoony than the “O’Shay” strip. The author of this article Elisa Narciso, who says she thinks the “Lucky Luke” strip didn’t work in the US because the guy was just a shiftless underachiever though he was “the man who shoots faster than his shadow”. He and his horse, “Jolly Jumper” who’s supposed to be a pinto quarter-horse, and his dog “Rantanplan” who became the star of a spin-off strip, are perpetually in pursuit of the Dalton Boys who seem a cartoon version of the Marx Bros. except they all look alike.

There’s another Western comic, Franco-Belgian, called “Blueberry” that’s quite realistic, more than “O’Shay.” Mike Blueberry “In any situation, he sees what he thinks needs doing, and he does it.” He’s living in the shadow of the War Between the States. I try to follow that pattern myself. “Blueberry” and “Lucky Luke” have never turned up on a newsstand around here. Maybe I should try to subscribe. Over the years there have been several artists, the same as Lucky Luke. The book compilations are on Amazon.

I’m a little surprised that in this town of Valier where there is so much pride in its Belgian roots that the Belgian strips are unknown. But then this article suggests that “Lucky Luke” is also available on YouTube as full-scale moving cartoons! I’ll spread the word! Here’s a starter link for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fiun9ShR8M (“Blueberry” was not on YouTube -- at least not by that name.)

Here are examples of the three:

Rick O'Shay