by Walter Agnew Moore II, Man of Letters
12 April 2002, Amiens, France

Now seeing as how I just locked myself out of the building I live in, and I have to wait an hour for my neighbors to come home and let me back in, I figured I'd stroll down to my Iinternet place and clue you in to the best thing they produce in France.

I'm not talking wine. I don't mean trains. I am not thinking of sassy girls with flashing eyes who pronounce my name as "Wal-taire!". Don't get me wrong, a night train with a sassy girl and a bottle of wine beats a sharp stick in the eye any day. But no, I am here to tell you about something even better.

French Comic Books.

OK, everybody who took High School French just flinched, didn't you? Yes, I too had that particular comic book jammed down my throat by my teacher, you know the one:

ASTERIX

Asterix the Little Gaul. Beloved by French teachers everywhere as they desperately try to find a way to connect to the glum little punks in their charge.

C'mon, I know you still resent your High School French teacher for making you say "s'il vous plait" before you could go tee-tee, but try to see it from her side: One day, she's young and desirable, thrilled as she cheats on her boyfriend with exotic foreigners during her Senior Year Abroad, then, suddenly, the next day she is stuck in front of 20 pimply teens, she suspects her fiancé of the last 8 years is gay, and everything she eats goes straight to her hips.

If that woman did anything short of walking into your classroom with dynamite strapped to her body, she was a saint. If she let you read Asterix comics, it meant that she loved you.

Me, I like Asterix comics OK, but I can never finish one— something about the artwork hurts my eyes. Plus, the constant "HaHa I am ze leetle Franchman who beats up all ze big stereotyped foreigners" joke got old about the 57th time I saw it.

The latest movie was really funny though.

So why do I mention Asterix? Because it is like the French Walt Disney product— it is the glue that holds this country together, and therefore allows Europe to stay together (I think it's even been translated into Basque), and that is good, because a fat happy Europe is a Europe that doesn't start World War 3, so I guess it's not too much to say that if you woke up this morning and you were not thrashing in the flames of thermonuclear explosions, you have Asterix to thank.

Now onto the second basic French Comic Book:

LUCKY LUKE

My friends here were shocked when I didn't recognize this title. It is even more widespread than Asterix. Lucky Luke is a stoic cartoon cowboy in a Western-Movie West, bringing justice to his foes, the Dalton Boys. He is a dead shot but never kills anybody, and his horse knows more tricks than one of those monkeys that they teach to do sign-language.

Now, if the CIA is not getting all its French Operations Agents to study Lucky Luke, they are wasting all of your tax dollars. Quite simply, 99 per cent of French people get their ideas about America from reading Lucky Luke. And if they forget, all they have to do is walk down the street and get a drink in the corner cafe— quite a few of the little Joe-Sixpack local bars in my neighborhood have some sort of Lucky Luke decorations among the clutter.

When the French like us, it is because we are acting like Lucky Luke: Keeping our mouths shut, minding our business, but rounding up the bad guys competently and without a fuss. When we mouth off or botch it, they see us as the Dalton Boys, bullying goons who never learn.

This whole Lucky Luke thing is reshaping the face of France. Whenever a new shopping center opens up, you can count on some restaurant named "Buffalo Grill" or somesuch being part of it. I was out at a shopping center earlier today on an errand, and I decided to drop into the place for lunch to see how weird it was.

The Buffalo Grill here has lots of booths in red leather, and a ship-load of brass lamps and furnishings in the Appleby's/Chili's/Generic-Restaurant-by-a-shopping-center style. They had pretty decent Country music going, spiced up with some Cajun fiddle tunes from time to time.

A short man in a blue shirt and a metal sheriff's badge met me at the door, when he heard my accent he switched to clear English, and we had a nice chat about how it was different to live in France, but it was all about making friends, wasn't it. Then as he seated me he said, "So, by your accent, I'd say you were English?"

"No— I am American."

"What part?"

"Way down South: Alabama—"

"Well welcome to Amiens."

"—but before I came to France, I lived in Texas."

"OH! Well, we ARE glad to have you then!"

Thank Lucky Luke comics. Texas was the magic word in this little Western restaurant. To keep one toe in France, I ordered a shot of Porto, enjoyed the complimentary salad, then I had a very good steak with pepper sauce that stung in a good way. Pie, espresso. Fizzy San Pellegrino water.

Instead of being a grotesque imitation America, it ended up being a mix of some of the best things about American and French food.

And as I sat there, it didn't seem fake. Not any more fake than the same restaurant would be sitting in some suburb of Houston. No Cowboy ever ate in a place like this. Maybe not Houston— there was a certain Latin flair to things. Maybe New Jersey.

OK, Asterix, Lucky Luke... I guess I still have time to tell you about a couple of titles I actually read.

ANYTHING BY TARDI

Tardi is the name of an artist/writer that I sort of stumbled onto here. His work is always interesting even when I don't get it, like that series with Adèle Blanc-Sec, who as near as I can figure is a detective who bops around late 1800's Paris stopping plagues of reanimated pterodactyls, y'know, that sort of thing can get out of hand fast when you let it.

I prefer his straight-up stuff: I am eagerly awaiting his second installment on "Le cri du peuple", that pulls you up inside the street-fighting in the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the lost Franco-Prussian war. You can *smell* the slums that he draws.

But my favorite by Tardi? Gotta be "C'était la guerre des tranchées" ("That was the trench-war"), based partly on stories told to him by his grandfather. Grim, depressing, horrifying. Before you sit down to read it, make sure you have the straight-razor within easy reach so you don't have to go look for it when its time to slash your wrists.

Tardi is the kind of stuff I would have been happy to read in High School. But while I am waiting for his new stuff to come out, I have started on a truly bad-ass series:

LOUIS LA GUIGNE

Louis La Guigne is one of those historical series they have a lot of here, where you follow a character or even a family through time.

I first saw a Louis La Guigne comic in France 3 years ago, and I didn't buy it because I was short of money.

Take my advice: the next time you see a good book, and you are short of money, buy the book. I spent three years trying to find this series again. I roamed the internet when I was in the States— I couldn't remember the title, artist, or writer, but I knew if I once saw the artwork again, I'd recognize it.

Back in France, I flailed around in various stores. I asked the clerks based on what I could remember. It wasn't fruitless— they turned me onto Tardi.

Then I was doing laundry at the place by the cathedral the other morning, and you know how you have that 40 minutes to kill while they are washing? I crossed the street, saw the "Librairie Cobra", and went in. Noticed that three-fourths of the shop was devoted to hundreds of titles of graphic novels.

I put my head down, stamped my hoof, and thought: "Now or never."

I went through each shelf, book by book. From the shelves over my head, to the ones where I hunched over at floor level. On both sides of the room. My legs cramped, my knees locked up.

One minute to go before the spin-cycle stopped, I pulled out a title with familiar artwork. I checked the others around it.

YES.

I bought it from the man wearing the beret (he really was), and said:

"I have been looking three years for this."

"Ah, but "Louis La Guigne"? You should have asked me, I could have easily helped you find it. Louis La Guigne, he is an Anarchist, it is a very good series..."

It wasn't the first volume, the one that starts the series in 1920. Louis is in a Paris cafe after spending three years as a draftee in the French Army *before* World War One, then the war broke out and he was in it until the end, then he had to do extra duty in Russia fighting Bolsheviks, where he took place in a mutiny that got him sent to Devil's Island, and he has just escaped from there.

The frist issue had some bank robbery that ended up with most of his gang, hardened war-veterans, getting massacred by the Paris cops in a hellacious shoot-out that tears apart an entire apartment building. I didn't get to the ending, but since there are at least 12 volumes, I take it that Louis survived.

The one I bought the other day, #3, has him and a catatonic Moulin Rouge actress trying to sneak out of the French-occupied Ruhr in 1923 to get to Berlin. Along the way, there are home-made bombs, outlawed Freikorps characters, Berlin cabaret life, starving kids, all lovingly drawn in a clear style with great care taken to get all the street scenes, fashions, and machinery just right.

It's worth it just to read the posters and graffiti on the buildings.

And of course, like any good Anarchist, Louis gets his pimp on at least once per book.

From glancing at the later titles, I take it that Louis travels Eastern Europe, America, Venice, and other places before he sees action in the Spanish Civil War.

I'll let you see my copies, if the Republicans and Democrats allow me to bring them back into the U.S.