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Lucky Luke with gay cowboy lovers: The wild west as a fetish paradise
Photo: Egmont Ehapa
Welcome to the mild west: while preparing for the night camp, the cowboys delight in how practical the one-piece underwear is, which can also be worn as pajamas for the night. During the endless drinking of coffee around the campfire that follows, they ponder how difficult it can be to come out between the cattle drive and the saloon fight. And while they are checking each other on the street of a western cafe, they enjoy the "crackle-tight" leather clothes worn by other cowboys.
The gay comic artist Ralf König has drawn the new adventure of the gunslinger Lucky Luke. And it is remarkable how he succeeds in transforming the western cosmos around the comic book hero into a dignified gay fetish paradise without breaking the main character in a clumsy ironic way. König simply takes what has always been there in the Lucky Luke world and accentuates it with the loving touch of the fan.
The
panty-shirt-jersey days called
Long John
are known from numerous scenes in which bandits and cardsharps are tarred and chased away from the city with springs.
The leather
chaps
worn for the cattle drive
, which nestle over the hips and thighs, but omit the crotch, are also very familiar to the Lucky reader - only that here the crotch that is omitted from the leather is emphasized in perspective.
But there is one thing that König has courageously added to the figures' equipment: They now have nipples;
that has never existed in the Lucky Luke anatomy.
And, of course: all figures have the bulbous noses typical of König.
How diverse was the west?
The comic cowboy will be 75 this year. And the fact that it has proven to be so durable may also have something to do with how open the Lucky Luke licensors are to innovations. A regular volume was only published in autumn, which, against the current Black Lives Matter background, dealt with racism and slavery with a brilliantly drawn and texted story. Why should you cancel the old, white cowboy when you can design the tableau around him in various ways? How funny and consistent that can be is shown by König's sovereign appropriation of the Lucky Luky myth, which appears as the fifth volume in the so-called homage series.
Even Lucky Luke creator Morris smuggled difficult social material into the stories in a light-footed way, there was always a progressive view of the primitive social order between the prairie and the saloon.
In the volume Der Richter, for example, Lucky Luke told a trigger-happy hillbilly lawyer what separation of powers meant;
in "Daily Star" he defended the freedom of the press against saloon owners who violated armed forces against the fact that the newspaper spread the truth about their adulterated liquor.
Lucky Luke, the virgin
King's rainbow western, on the other hand, is almost entirely devoid of grotesque and cheerful violence. In his jubilee year, Lucky Luke only has to drive five purple dairy cows through a soft mountain landscape, which gives him plenty of time to talk to his companion Bud Willlis about his gay coming-out on Bareback Mountain. The dairy cows come from a Swiss chocolate manufacturer who raves about the "delicate melt" of his product. But this tender melt also refers to the "Brokeback Mountain" -like love story that Lucky Luke is told by the other cowboy here during bathing stops and bed whispering in the tent camp.
The title hero remains the eternal "virgin" - at least that's how he is now called by his old friend Calamity Jane, who now lives openly as a lesbian.
She has a relationship with the "chicory" warrior Sitting Butch, who has adorned her horse in rainbow colors.
König doesn't force Lucky Luke to come out at gunpoint, but makes him the object of gay desires by zooming in on different parts of the body, such as the shaved neck under the bold undercut.
With his own cartoon characters, König introduced the gay subculture to a large mainstream audience from the 1980s onwards.
In his Lucky Luke band he also sprinkles all sorts of hardcore references into softcore flirtation - the place of longing Bareback Mountain, for example, refers in its name to unprotected anal intercourse.
But König is not interested in small provocations, but in the big western story in a gay version.
It's great how he developed a complex narrative structure for this and how he dovetailed different time levels through flashbacks.
He is reminiscent of the late western epics of the grand master director John Ford, from whom Lucky Luke creator Morris was also inspired.
The heroes of König decorate their own legends in long “So-Was-that-then” passages - only that these legends are not about how many men you killed, but how the man of dreams was found.