Maurice De Bevere, known as “Morris,” is a Belgian cartoonist and comic book writer, born in 1923.
He created Lucky Luke in 1946, followed by Rantanplan in 1987. In 1990, he founded Lucky Productions to promote his work. He was awarded the Prize of honour at the special 20th anniversary of the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 1992. In 1998, he was made Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. Morris passed away in 2001 at the age of 77.
Morris is known as being one of the founding fathers of comic books. He was born in Courtrai (Kortrijk-Belgium) on December 1, 1923 as Maurice De Bevere. After earning his high school diploma and studying law in university, he took drawing lessons from Jean Image, where he also learned animation techniques. Shortly after, he joined the Belgian News Company, an animation studio where he met André Franquin, Eddy Paape, and Peyo.
In 1945, he was asked to illustrate Le Moustique; he would go on to create more than 250 covers for this humorous magazine! It was during this period that he chose the pseudonym “Morris” to script and draw the first humorous adventures of Lucky Luke. These appeared for the first time under the title “Arizona 1880” in the “Spirou Almanac” in 1947.
Lucky Luke is characterized as a solitary cowboy with a big heart and an unwavering sense of justice. He is generally accompanied by his wise horse Jolly Jumper, the dumbest dog in the West Rantanplan. and is surrounded by a cast of colourful characters. Morris also introduced famous American Far-West figures, such as the bumbling Dalton brothers, Billy the Kid, Judge Roy Bean, Calamity Jane, and other historical personalities like the actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Overall Lucky Luke quickly rose to international fame in the world of comic books thanks to Morris’ simple, expressive, and incredibly effective drawing style.
From 1948 to 1955, Morris travelled across the United States with his friends Franquin and Jijé (Joseph Gillain). He met with comic book parody experts from the magazine Mad: Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, and Wallace Wood. In New York, he met René Goscinny, whom he later invited to collaborate as a scriptwriter upon his return to Europe. These two legendary figures of the world of comic books worked together with passion until Goscinny’s death in 1977.
In total about twenty other writers would go on to assist Morris. To this day, nearly 90 albums of Lucky Luke adventures have been translated into about 30 languages, and printed in hundreds of millions of copies.
Morris had a lifelong passion for cinema. In 1971, he exploited this passion for the first time with Lucky Luke in the creation of Daisy Town (Belvision Studios, Brussels) with the help of Goscinny, Pierre Tchernia, and composer Claude Bolling. From there additional feature films followed: La Ballade des Dalton (Idéfix Studio, Paris) in 1978, and Les Dalton en cavale (Hanna-Barbera Productions, Los Angeles) in 1983. In 1984, a series of 26 animated episodes based on Lucky Luke albums was produced for television by Gaumont, Hanna-Barbera, and France 3. In 1991, Dargaud Films, IDDH, and France 3 released a second series of 26 episodes, while Terence Hill starred as the lone cowboy in ten films.
The growing popularity of Lucky Luke and the characters in his universe led to a flourishing variety advertising campaigns, product lines, and multimedia adaptations.
In 1987, Morris created Rantanplan, a series with initial episodes written by Jean Léturgie and Xavier Fauche.
In 1990, he founded Lucky Productions, now known as Lucky Comics, through a partnership with Dargaud publishing.
With numerous awards to his name, Morris was particularly proud of the medal awarded to him by the World Health Organization in Geneva in 1988, for having removed Lucky Luke’s trademark cigarette.
Another exceptional honour: on June 27, 1992, the Academy of Grand Prix awarded him the special 20th Anniversary Grand Prize of the Angoulême International Comics Festival. A peerless honour from his colleagues. Naturally, he presided over the international celebrations for the Centennial of Comic Books in 1996, as a polyglot able to converse in at least seven languages.
The 50th anniversary of Lucky Luke was celebrated in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, and Scandinavia with various events culminating in Paris on September 10, 1997, exactly fifty years after Morris created the iconic “lonesome cowboy” walking into the sunset.
On October 20, 1998, the French Minister of Culture and Communication named Morris an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Morris coined the term “ninth art” to designate comics, as well as the phrase “faster than his shadow,” which has since entered common language.
Morris passed away on July 16, 2001, at the age of 77.