The Tenderfoot — Rene Goscinny

Graphic novels or Les BD (bandes dessinées)! In Europe, they go mad for them! They call it the 8th Art. Every year, a thriving international festival takes place at Angoulême (France) to celebrate graphic novels, a popular art form as well respected as any literary genre. In fact, there are all kinds of BD for both adults and children. They are available everywhere from the village bookshop to the supermarket via cultural media stores like La FNAC or Virgin. My personal love of BD was kindled while living in France. However, it wasn't until the birth of my first son in 1988 that I saw any need to translate and publish them. The struggle of translating them for every bedtime story told me that there had to be an easier way! So, from a desire to have a ready and plentiful supply of these wonderful books available in English, Glo'worm was eventually born in early 1998. Conscious that the English reading public at large was not properly aware of BD, and out of admiration for the work of Goscinny (the author of Asterix), I decided to start with another of his characters: Lucky Luke. Lucky Luke is this super cool cowboy who, with his wisecracking horse Jolly Jumper, protects the population West of the Mississippi from the exaction of all kinds of villains, some real (The Daltons, Jesse James) and some invented. The stories, always well researched, combine fact, fiction and humorous send off with a refreshing lack of political correctness. So far, we have published four titles - Calamity Jane, Jesse James, Dalton City and The Tenderfoot. In total, there are over 60 Lucky Luke titles. An amazing success story worldwide for the last 50 years, there are 250 million Lucky Luke books in print in over 26 languages worldwide. From my own research, the ecstatic response to the BD by my children and their friends proved beyond any doubt that these books deserve to be read by English speakers and that English speaking children deserve the opportunity to read them. Glo'worm sets out to give them this opportunity. Best known as the author of Asterix, Goscinny is also the talent behind the scenario of Lucky Luke, the hugely popular comic book of 'the cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow'. Goscinny was born on 11 August 1926 in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Stanislas (Simkha) from Warsaw and of Anna Beresniak from Khodorkow, a small Ukrainian village. In 1928, his parents took him to Argentina, where his father, a chemical engineer, had been seconded. He spent a happy childhood in Buenos Aires, and studied at the French Lycée just before the Second World War. He had a habit of making every one laugh in class, probably to compensate for a natural shyness. He started drawing very early on, inspired by the illustrated stories which he enjoyed reading. In 1945, he emigrated to the United States. I went to the United States to work with Walt Disney he was to say later but Walt Disney didn't know that. He found himself in New York, jobless, alone and totally broke. The next 6 years, which he spent in New York, are often considered his formative years. As he said It was not so bad.it toughened me up, although I would have liked it better if others had been toughened up on my behalf. It is during these years that he met his first friends, some who were to publish Mad in 1945, and others with whom he was to collaborate for a long time to come. Among these was Maurice de Bévère aka Morris, the cartoonist and first author of Lucky Luke. He also met Georges Troisfontaines, the boss of the World Press Agency in Belgium, who persuaded Goscinny to work for him. He returned to Europe in 1951 for this purpose, but was fired in 1956 for trying to put in place a charter to protect the status of cartoonists and scenarist. The years until the creation of the magazine Pilote were years of transition, when Goscinny's talent matured and he seized upon many opportunities. Besides his collaboration with Morris on the Lucky Luke series from 1955 onwards, Goscinny worked on the scenario of Le petit Nicolas (Little Nicholas) in cartoon form with its creator, Sempé. In 1959 the magazine Pilote was launched. Goscinny found his place in the editorial team among some of his faithful friends from World Press. The aim of Pilote was to change radically the way that the graphic novel (the BD) would be perceived in France, and competed with Tintin and Spirou magazines on their own territories. How best to go about that task than by inventing an astute little Gaul, give him a large size sidekick and place their adventures within a little village of irreducible Gauls whose names all end in -ix? Asterix is born. The bande dessinée enters adulthood. He married Gilberte Pollaro-Millo in 1967. In 1968 his daughter Anne is born. Many young authors owe their fame to Goscinny, who opened for them the pages of Pilote. While working on scenarios for the television and the cinema and on many different texts, Goscinny headed Pilote in one capacity or ano