The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Last week, Jacques Martin died in his home in Switzerland.  As the creator of Alix and Lefranc he was one of the founding fathers of the Tintin style of Franco-Belgian comics, particularly predominant in the magazine of the same name, and in terms of graphical language and subject matter quite the opposite of the Spirou school, which developed starting from the early work of people like Jijé, Franquin and Peyo.

(Jacques Martin – right – with Hergé, pic borrowed from the entry on the always invaluable Lambiek site)

Other people have quite expertly given an overview of Martin’s life and work, and of his importance for European comics (see Comics Reporter, Le Figaro or La Nouvelle Obs, to name but a few).  I don’t have that much to add to their stories, but what I would like to do is try to explain why Martin’s death is indeed the end of an era for European comics as a clearly defined artform with a clearly defined purpose.

Along with his colleagues at Tintin, Martin created comics that were acceptable.  Even in the seventies, if your library or school here had any comics, chances were they were books by Hergé, Jacobs, Martin or De Moor (to name but a few).  These were books that presented a certain worldview that confirmed the established opinion (after all, this is the time of the cold war), and which promoted good Christian values like honesty, self-sacrifice, heroism and chastity.  Alix, Martin’s best-known creation, had the additional benefit of being set in the times of the Roman empire, which classified them amongst the Books That You Can Learn From.  And finally, and this was something that Martin and particularly Jacobs had in common, these comics were literary – they almost contained more text than pictures.  Martin didn’t shy away from simply using a smaller font if he couldn’t fit a particular soliloquy in a balloon that was already taking up 80 % of the panel in the first place.  These comics didn’t make you lazy, and so they were commendable in the eyes of parents and teachers.

How different were the adventures of Spirou and Fantasio, Les Tuniques Bleues, Buck Danny, Gil Jourdan or Tif et Tondu?  They also steered quite clear from anything that could even remotely cause offence, but their stories were exciting and suspenseful.  The panels in these books weren’t static snapshots, but exploded with movement and humour.   Their creators used the unique language of comics to create something else than an illustrated narration: they created movies on paper.

(Alix, Les premières aventures, by and (c)  Jacques Martin, published Casterman)

Still, I liked Martin’s books a lot as a child.  I couldn’t care about Lefranc, which, by the time I got around to them were already relics of an age gone by, in which a single heroic man battling the same villain over and over again against a backdrop of geopolitical doom sounded plausible, but I liked Alix.  Martin didn’t just set his stories against a backdrop of history – he made history an integral part of his stories.  He didn’t limit himself to those elements that you know from school, but introduced you to new peoples that you had never heard of, and he tried to explain the political reasons for certain historical events.  Also, he didn’t shy away from the less savoury parts of history: to him the Romans weren’t the heroic people who conquered Europe and left us a lot of buildings – he brought up slavery, oppression and racism, he set the Romans up against one another and showed his readers that not everything was as simple as our teachers told us.

(scenes from martin’s Vercingétorix album, by and (C) Jacques Martin, published Casterman)

Even within the limits of propriety of his times, Martin tried to be as close to reality as possible, even when it came to nudity and sex.  He has often been asked whether Alix and his friend Enak were involved in a homosexual relationship, and, even though he never admitted as much, he never denied it either.  It was just one of those aspects of life in Ancient Rome, which he tried to encapsulate in its entirety.  In that way, he paved the way for other series like Vernal and Franz with Yugurtha or, more recently, Dufaux and Delaby with Murena, which were able to focus even more on the cruel and the sordid aspects of life in Roman times.  But they worked for a more mature audience, in a time when comics as a medium were expanding from kids’ fare to a full-fledged artform on their own.  Which, in turn, was the end of the traditional Franco-Belgian comic as it had flourished for a quarter-century.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium where its not unusual to see major comics characters decorating the sides of large buildings; you can read more of his comics musings on The Ephemerist blog