Morris (comics)

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Maurice de Bevere (December 1, 1923 - July 16, 2001), better known as Morris, was a Belgian cartoonist and the creator of Lucky Luke. His pen name is an alternate spelling of his first name.

[edit] Biography

Born in Kortrijk, Belgium, Morris started drawing in the Compagnie Belge d'Actualités (CBA) animations studios, a small and short-lived animation studios in Belgium where he met Peyo and André Franquin.^[1] After the war, the company folds and Morris works as an illustrator for Het Laatste Nieuws, a Flemish newspaper, and Le Moustique, a weekly magazine published by Dupuis, for which he makes some 250 covers and numerous other illustrations, mainly caricatures of movie stars.^[1]

He created Lucky Luke in 1946 for Spirou magazine, the comics magazine of Dupuis. Lucky Luke is a solitary cowboy who travels across the Wild West, helping those in need, and aided by his faithful horse, Jolly Jumper. Lucky Luke's first adventure, Arizona 1880, was published in "L'Almanach Spirou 1947." Morris becomes one of the central artists of the magazine, and is one of the so-called "bande a 4" (group of 4), with Jijé, André Franquin and Will.^[1] He does not work at the house of Jijé, contrary to the other two, but all four become very good friends and stimulate each other artistically. They lay together the foundation for the "Marcinelle school", the typical style of comics in Spirou which contrasts both stylistically and thematically with the "Ligne claire" used by the group of artists around Hergé in Tintin magazine.

In 1948, Morris, Jijé and Franquin travel to the United States (Will was too young and had to stay in Belgium). They want to get to know the country, see what is left of the Wild West, and meet some American comic artists. Morris stays the longest of the three and only returns after 6 years. He has in the meantime worked for Mad, and had met René Goscinny, a French comic artist and writer, who would write all the Lucky Luke stories between 1955 and his death in 1977. Goscinny was then still fairly unknown, but would become the most successful European comic writer with first Lucky Luke and a few years later Asterix.^[1] The years in the USA turn out to be crucial for Morris, not only because he met Goscinny, but also because he gathered tons of documentation for his later work, and because he got to know the Hollywood movies even better. Morris introduced in the following years many cinematic techniques in his stories, like freeze-frames and close-ups. Walt Disney's style has influenced him a lot. This can be seen in the very round lines that characterize the early Lucky Luke albums^[2]. Many characters in his comics are also clearly based on famous American actors like Jack Palance, Gary Cooper and William Hart, although he also caricaturizes unexpected figures like Louis de Funès or Serge Gainsbourg.^[1]

The first 31 adventures were published by Dupuis, but in the late sixties, Morris left Dupuis and Spirou and went to Dargaud and Pilote, the magazine started by his friend Goscinny.

In 1984, Hanna-Barbera made a series of 52 cartoons of Lucky Luke, thereby augmenting the popularity of the series even further. 52 more cartoons were made in the early 1990s, and three live action movies followed. A few videogames based on the series were also made, e.g. for the Playstation 1 and the Game Boy Color. Lucky Luke is currently the best selling European comics series ever, with over 300 million copies sold in more than thirty languages.^[1]

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Morris never had many series he worked on, although he made lots of illustrations for stories in the forties and fifties. In the nineties, he did make Rantanplan, a spin-off from Lucky Luke, starring the dumbest dog in the West.