There have been few artists as effective at introducing the setting for their new series as Hermann is here, the first page of the first Jeremiah story:
The idea of the United States descending into a racial civil war was “in the air” in the sixties and seventies, for obvious reasons. Hermann at this point had spent some time in America, having lived in Canada when younger and traveled extensively through the US as well. As he explained in an interview in Stripschrift 177, he felt that white Americans were high on their own presumed superiority while Black Americans were only waiting for the right opportunity to “kill whitey”. Which is why he choose this particular scenario to create the setting for his new western series.
Because that’s obviously what Jeremiah was, a western, just one set in post-apocalyptic America rather than the 1870s. The first couple of albums especially would’ve needed little to remake them into straight western stories. Just look at that desert landscape above, seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Hermann was playing to his strengths, having spent a decade drawing Comanche when he started Jeremiah in 1978. The protagonists too are familiar types: Jeremiah himself, decent, naive, slightly dull and Kurt Vardy, a proper cynical villain but one with a heart of gold. The very first story sees Jeremiah’s home community destroyed and its people enslaved, with Kurt accidentally saving him from their fate. They end up fighting the man responsible for it, the corrupt boss of Langdon, the sort of lawless town again familiar if you’ve e.g seen A Fistful of Dollars. Jeremiah and Vardy riding away into the sunset at the end of it, the start of a beautiful friendship.
It’s a decent story but not that original or interesting to be honest. Far more interesting is the origin story of the series itself. Hermann until then had been a penciler, working for Greg on Bernard Prince and Comanche with little input on the plotting of these series. Though he enjoyed working with Greg, he also got frustrated by the limitations of this collaboration. Meanwhile there was a German publisher, Springer, who published a biweekly comics magazine Zack, with ambitious plans for going European. Zack already published new series by well known stars liker Charlier/Giraud, Jean Graton and Albert Weinberg, having poached them from the Franco-Belgian magazines and now offered Hermann the same chance. In 1979 Springer launched the French Super As and the Dutch Wham! and Jeremiah was one of the launch titles in it. This ambitious project failed miserably but Jeremiah was born.
Jeremiah is Hermann’s longest running and most successful series, with a fortyone albums published between 1979 and 2023. As the series evolved it lost some of its western characteristics, some stories even being entirely set in cities! Jeremiah got a television series in 2002, but that seems to have had little to do with the actual comic.
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