The U Ray - The Comics Journal (2024)

In a later storyline, appearing in the first volume of Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics (ed. Byrne and Keith Mayerson, Fantagraphics, 2024), the character Half-Wit John shows the draft of his novel, Eternal Love, to another character. The novel reads:

"One evening our hero sat in the moonlight with his lady love. "Will you always love me forever?" she screamed in Polish. A year later his brother Otto died. Next year in Cincinnati Bill Gooch and Annie Gargle fell in love. Tom Jinks's [sic] dog had puppies five years later. Then on Christmas Sammy Schultz got a new sled. Next year----"

This is not altogether too far from the experience of reading Edgar P. Jacobs' The U Ray, originally published by Bravo in 1943, and presented in English by British publisher Cinebook late last year, in a translation by Jerome Saincantin. Indeed, the first word that comes to mind when looking at the comic's cover is “clutter.” A birdlike plane appears to soar inside an ancient Mesoamerican-looking temple; a large snake looms above an octopus splashing in water, reaching for an ape-like humanoid; in front of them all, the large sculpture of a head with glowing eyes. It looks, more than anything, like a Samplerman-type piece, incongruity reigning supreme.

Jacobs is an odd presence, at once under-discussed, given his influence on Franco-Belgian comics, and immediately familiar. If you know about The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, you know about The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer's two core problems: its extreme verbosity, and a political conservatism that might make even Hergé bristle. But then, you also know about the connection to Hergé: friends, turned colleagues, turned frenemies and mutual friendly threat—yet condemned, like the rest of the Studios Hergé, to be judged by an impossible standard.

Conceived as Bravo's replacement for Flash Gordon—American strips were refused import under Nazi occupation—The U Ray picks and chooses from real-world historical aesthetic in crafting a world that is similar enough to ours while still avoiding any accidental political poignancy (though still retaining an underlying racial hierarchy – India may not exist in this world, but you can be sure there's an Indian servant). It's a straightforward enough affair—an expedition to an untamed wilderness, seeking the deposit of a powerful ore to be weaponized amidst war between global superpowers—that the only way forward, for Jacobs, is by way of contrivance.

It cannot be said that Jacobs is an incompetent cartoonist; The U Ray was created before he officially banded with Hergé, before his style was subsumed by the dictates of ligne claire, and his artwork here has more dimensionality and weight. The swiftly-changing vistas demonstrate much thought being put into each crag and forest tree, his wildernesses coming alive marvelously. Among other things, I am largely convinced that I've never come across a better-drawn octopus in any comic I've read (to any comic creators reading this, yes, you may indeed consider this a challenge). It's worth noting that Jacobs, outside of comics, was also an opera and theatre enthusiast, working both onstage, as a singer, and off, designing costumes and set-pieces. Theatre, though, is a field of semiotic constraint—the confined space of the stage is a constant challenge to the viewer's disbelief, warranting extra work in signifying environmental wholeness even when none such exists. In his comics, Jacobs goes to the other extreme—the sites and locations in The U Ray are packed with articulation, leaving little in the way of guesswork.

And yet 'set-piece,' here, is entirely appropriate. The problem is not that the story is a substitute for Flash Gordon, but that it feels like a substitute for itself. The story’s pace, which more or less dictates that a threat is nullified within two pages of its introduction, prohibits Jacobs from establishing the sense of palpable risk that a successful adventure narrative requires; we are presented instead with an undulation of non-threat and resolution that goes beyond convenience and into desensitization. The characters hold no distinctive features; they stand apart from one another about as much as a Monopoly thimble stands apart from its counterpart race car—they move along the board about the same way, and their game is about as tiresome.

The U Ray, as such, is a comic almost entirely without theme. The reader is left with little to latch onto besides foregone conclusion and tired inevitability as the breakneck bombast of events buckles under the strain of repetition. Entirely unintentionally, it reads almost as an aesthetic or formal experiment, stretching the conventions of genre thin to the point of arbitrariness.

It's worth pointing out this is not, strictly speaking, the version of The U Ray that the children of France and Belgium read in the pages of the magazine Bravo; in its original form, the comic sported no speech balloons, only stiff narration describing what is already going on in the panel. It was only some thirty years later that Jacobs went back and reformatted, with new coloring by Bruno Tatti and direct representation of dialogue (though much of the narration is retained).1 I can say that the work certainly benefits from the dialogue, but hardly by much; it's illustrative, but entirely perfunctory and lifeless.

What underlies this publication is a reluctance to allow The U Ray, as a work, to stand on its own. The book advertises an upcoming sequel, written by none other than veteran Belgian scribe Jean Van Hamme, yet at the same breath frames the original Jacobs work as a footnote, an artifact: the phrase "before Blake and Mortimer" appears on the spine and back cover, and the article appended to the back of the book, taken from Claude Le Gallo's The World of Edgar P. Jacobs (Le Lombard, 1984), focuses entirely on that series, relegating the actual album at hand to a mere developmental stepping-stone in Jacobs' career.

Comparing Jacobs to Méliès and Lumière, the introduction by Belgian cartoonist Michel Greg says that rereading The U Ray is "to acknowledge what an era owes to a few." A fine sentiment, true enough, but it also shows the inverse: beholden to the turn-of-the-20th-century adventure fiction that came before him, Jacobs himself owes a great deal to a few (Verne, Raymond, Conan Doyle), and his debt is paid with little in the way of interest. What choice, then, do returns have—but to diminish?

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1. Not at all a rare occurrence in Franco-Belgian comics; Jacobs himself was involved in the reworking of numerous episodes of Tintin. This was done in the interests of creating a 'timeless' feel, both in terms of Tintin chronology itself and the broader context of comics.