The seamless fusion of actual motorsport and fictional adventure was central to the extensive oeuvre of Jean Graton, Michel Vaillant’s spiritual father. On Thursday, the 97-year-old French cartoonist who became a racing legend with drawing pen and paper died.
Which motorsport enthusiast did not grow up with it? Whole generations devoured the adventures of Michel Vaillant and his good friend Steve Warson during their childhood. Jean Graton prompted Formula 1 legends like Alain Prost to take up racing and inspired renowned designers such as Luc Donckerwolke to build Lamborghinis. The Michel Vaillant series was created 63 years ago in the comic weekly Tintin and grew into a comic catalog of half a century of motorsport history.
Graton was born in Nantes, France in 1923, but moved to Brussels, the cradle of the ninth art, after the Second World War. Graton’s first drawing was published in the newspaper Le Soir when he was barely 8 years old. His professional drawing career started with the comic weekly magazine ‘Spirou’. Not much later he was picked up by the weekly magazine ‘Tintin’, which was then led by Hergé, the spiritual father of Tintin and a great car enthusiast himself. His sense of composition and movement was especially expressed when he was allowed to draw covers for the magazine. No one was asked to do the front page as often as Graton, and Michel Vaillant was out of the question at the time. One in three covers was his!
The figure of Michel Vaillant first appeared in the short story Bon sang ne peut mentir (roughly translated: the apple does not fall far from the tree) that appeared on February 7, 1957 in the comic weekly. Four more short stories followed before the first full-length album was released in 1959. Thanks to Hergé and the rapidly growing international success of the comic book series, Graton is given carte blanche to deepen his comic character. De Klare Lijn, Hergé’s comic ideom, is perfect for him: the clear realism, the meticulous depiction of the cars and the circuit decor, the incorruptible heroes with a tough jawline. Graton travels all over the world with a camera and sketchbook to portray international racing as adequately as possible. At a time when motorsport is hardly broadcast on television, he draws and photographs everything he sees and encounters on and around the circuits, to later adapt it behind his drawing board into a hyper-realistic storyline.
Juan Manuel Fangio, Jean Graton and Asterix and Obelix draftsman Albert Uderzo.
Every drawing is almost a pop art work of art long before that drawing style is recognized as such. V.rooaarppp. Vroaaammm. Iiiiiii. Shhaa. Anxious. Tchak. Those screaming letters – lesson bruitages in French – bring pace to the prints and translate the eardrum-tearing soundtrack of the race track to the silent paper. Although all those beautifully drawn cars are all masterpieces, Jean Graton never dreams of a career as a car designer. The creative freedom of the comic strip is far too close to his heart for that.
After Michel Vaillant’s first adventure, 69 more will follow under his wing. Unlike Hergé, who took Tintin to the grave and explicitly forbade it to be made a follow-up series after his death, Graton had no qualms about his son Philippe taking over the drawing pencil in 2004 – Graton was now 80 – . Phillipe Graton released another nine albums with a modernized storyline. The original Michel Vaillant series, with 70 albums, ended in 2007 after 20 million copies sold in 16 countries. According to time-honored comic strip tradition, Michel Vaillant never grew older and evolved with all the developments of car and motorcycle racing.
Jean Graton and French Ferrari Formula 1 driver Patrick Tambay at the Zandvoort circuit in 1983.
Michel Vaillant remained immortal, unlike the lifelike drivers Graton incorporated into his stories as comic cameos over many generations. In 2003 the series was made into a successful film by French director Louis-Pascal Couvelaire, with Luc Besson as screenwriter and producer. As a draftsman, Jean Graton has received several awards in both France and Belgium.