Can the horse really talk?

"Lucky Luke" is a Franco-Belgian comic, extremely popular in Sweden during my childhood and still going strong. Are we to believe Wikipedia, it's huge in Canada as well. But not, alas, in the United States. The comic is a Wild West parody. Perhaps Americans don't like their heroic past parodied by French-speaking Europeans?

Lucky Luke is a poor, lonesome cowboy a long way from home. Or so he sings at the end of every comic album, as he rides towards the setting sun. Naturally, he is also the fastest gunman in the West, drawing faster than his own shadow. He rides a talking horse, aptly named Jolly Jumper. There is some debate among the fans whether Jolly Jumper actually can speak, or whether the creators of "Lucky Luke" have simply translated his whinnying! Another curious character is Rantamplan, "the stupidest dog in the West", who always gets Lucky Luke into trouble.

And there is a lot of trouble in the Old West, even in this parody version. Lucky Luke meets a lot of real characters from Wild West history: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane and the Dalton brothers. His main adversaries, however, are the "unknown cousins of the Dalton brothers", who are fictitious and more stupid than the real Daltons. Rantamplan is charged with guarding their prison, from which they constantly escape, only to be apprehended by Lucky Luke.

In my opinion, all albums are about equally funny, at least from a European perspective. The parody is good-humoured, but nevertheless feels like a necessary corrective to the overwrought Myth of the West.

In this album, "The Oklahoma Land Rush", Lucky Luke is charged with overseeing the 1889 land run in Oklahoma. His prime task is to arrest bandits and sooners. Curiously, the story ends with the settlers failing, going home and giving Oklahoma back to the Indians, who end up becoming multimillionaires when oil is discovered on their land. 

If only, if only...