Lucky Luke

Which ones in particular stood out to you that you tended to gravitate towards that really helped fuel that fire?

So there was really like two things, right? There was the French comics, the European comics, so Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, the Smurfs.

I ended up getting a chance to direct a featurette of the Smurfs from Sony a few years ago.

That was kind of full circle kind of thing.

Il y avait, il y avait les deux, effectivement.

Moi, c'était Lucky Luke.

Oui, Lucky Luke aussi.

Moi, ils ont tous passé.

Achille Talon, tout ça.

I was drawing cartoon characters from the newspapers and stuff.

But the French school that I went to was really open to comics through Tin Tin and Asterix and Lucky Luke.

Right.

Um-

Great! Now, how the heck are we moving that big-ass thing? They built some sort of contraption I can only describe to you as a bankruptcy barrel.

I've first seen those in Lucky Luke, the Belgian bande dessinée Lucky Luke.

The bankruptcy barrel is a Western trope.

If you're destitute, maybe you shorted the gold market just before the gold rush, or maybe you lost your shirt in a poker game at the saloon, then you wore a bankruptcy barrel.

Does his military service in France, so he's very attached to France, and then kind of gets into those circles of comic writers.

That's the time when he meets Morris, who is the illustrator of Lucky Luke.

And Goscinny becomes the author.

So Goscinny wrote many of the Lucky Luke comics also.

And he meets a fellow called Jo- Georges Troisfontaines.

George, uh, Three Fountains is the translation of his name.