Jo, Zette and Jocko
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko is a comic book (or bande dessinée) series created by Hergé (real name Georges Remi), the Belgian writer-artist who was best known for The Adventures of Tintin. The heroes of the series are two young children Jo and Zette Legrand and their pet monkey Jocko.
Jo, Zette and Jocko made a few cameo appearances in The Adventures of Tintin [citation needed], which makes their subtle crossover references to Tintin and Snowy, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson and other characters. They also appear on the back of some editions of The Adventures of Tintin series.
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[edit] Origins
In 1935, six years after Tintin had first appeared in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième, Hergé was approached by Father Courtois, director of the weekly French newspaper Coeurs Vaillants, with a view to creating a new comic strip series for the paper. While Father Courtois enjoyed Tintin, he wanted a set of characters that would embody classical family values – a young boy, with a father who works, a mother, a little sister and a pet – in contrast to the more independent Tintin.
Inspired by a toy monkey called Jocko, Hergé created Jo Legrand, his sister Zette and their pet monkey Jocko as well as their engineer father, Jacques, and housewife mother. Their first adventure, The Secret Ray appeared in the pages of Coeurs Vaillants on January 19, 1936 and ran until June of 1937.
Between 1936 and 1957, three complete Jo, Zette and Jocko adventures would be published, spread across five albums. Hergé however often felt restricted by the family set-up: whereas the older, more independent Tintin could just head off on any adventure, either alone or with like Captain Haddock or Professor Calculus, this was not possible for Jo, Zette and Jocko whose parents had to figure large in any adventure – usually to act as their rescuer. In the end, these constraints led him to eventually abandon Jo, Zette and Jocko in the late-1950s.
[edit] Bibliography
- The ‘Manitoba’ No Reply (Le Manitoba ne Répond Plus) (Volume 1 of The Secret Ray)
- Pirates are robbing transatlantic liners. Jo, Zette and Jocko, playing in a rowing boat, get lost at sea when a thick fog comes down. Rescued by the pirates’ submarine, they are taken to their secret undersea base where their leader, the evil professor, has plans for the two young children…
- The Eruption of Karamako (L’Eruption du Karamako) (Volume 2 of The Secret Ray)
- Jo, Zette and Jocko escape the pirates’ undersea hideout in an amphibious tank, and come ashore on a desert island where cannibals prepare them for the pot. Jocko intervenes and the natives, outwitted by the children, surrender to them. Meanwhile, the pirates continue to search for the runaways…
- Mr. Pump’s Legacy (Le Testament de Monsieur Pump) (Volume 1 of The Stratoship H.22)
- Mr Pump’s legacy is ten million dollars. It will go to the builders of the first aeroplane to fly from Paris to New York at 1000 kilometres per hour. Jo and Zette's father sets about designing such a plane, but then he and the plane come under threat from saboteurs.
- Destination New York (Destination New York) (Volume 2 of The Stratoship H.22)
- To save the Stratoship H.22, designed by their father and now threatened by gangsters, Jo and Zette have taken off in the aircraft. Their pet monkey has gone too. They crash land near the North Pole and nearly perish in a snow storm. But they battle on to save the Stratoship, and, in a race against time, to win the trans-Atlantic challenge. (Back cover blurb from the English edition)
- The Valley of the Cobras (La Vallée des Cobras)
- When a snowball goes astray – and hits a Maharajah – Jo, Zette and their pet monkey Jocko begin an adventure that takes them from Alpine ski-slopes to a snake-infested gorge in the Himalayas. Hergé’s story is as full of excitement and laughter as one of his Tintin books, with unforgettable characters like the Maharajah of Gopal, his long suffering secretary Badalah and the evil but accident-prone fakir of the Valley of the Cobras. (Back cover blurb from the English edition)
[edit] Le Thermozéro
Le Thermozéro is the sixth, uncompleted, Jo, Zette and Jocko adventure. It began life in 1958 as a Tintin adventure of the same name. Hergé had asked the French comic book creator Greg (Michel Regnier) to provide a scenario for a new Tintin story. Greg came up with two potential plots: Les Pilules (The Pills) and Le Thermozéro. Greg made sketches of the first few pages of Le Thermozéro [1] before the project was abandoned in 1960 – Hergé decided that he wished to retain sole creative control of his work.
Sometime after this, Hergé sought to resurrect Le Thermozéro as a Jo, Zette and Jocko adventure and instructed his long time collaborator Bob de Moor to work on an outline. Bernard Tordeur of the Hergé Foundation has suggested, at the World of Tintin Conference held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich on May 15, 2004, that a complete draft outline (similar to what survives of Tintin and Alph-Art) was completed before the project was terminated [2]. This draft version of the book apparently survives in the Tintin Archives.
Little is known about the plot other than it would have been set in Berlin, possibly in a cold war drama.
[edit] English Translations
The Valley of the Cobras was the first Jo, Zette and Jocko adventure to be translated and published in English in 1986. Mr Pump’s Legacy and Destination New York followed in 1987.
The ‘Manitoba’ No Reply and The Eruption of Karamako remained unpublished (possibly due to Hergé’s unsympathetic depiction of the primitive natives of the island of Karamako, similar to Tintin in the Congo) until 1994 when they were published together in a single limited-edition double volume titled The Secret Ray.
[edit] External links
| The Adventures of Tintin | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin | ||||
| Characters: | Supporting · Minor · Complete list | |||
| Miscellany: | Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations | |||
