To be honest I wasn’t sure he was still alive, but Tom Spurgeon has just reported his death last Saturday, with a very nice obituary in which he called Paape “one of the last remaining ties to the initial heyday of 20th Century French-language comics publishing”. You might best compare him to somebody like Don Heck, an artist with decades of good, solid work under his belt, never quite in the first rank of cartoonists perhaps, but with his own charm nonetheless.
Paape had worked on both Spirou and Tintin weekly comics magazines, the Marvel and DC of Belgian-Franco comics, with Tintin being slightly stuffier and a little bit more respectable. While Paape got his start at Spirou, it was Tintin were he left his mark, starting in the mid-sixties when Greg, the Belgian Stan Lee, took over the magazine as editor/writer and revamped it with more adventure stories, modish and stylish, of which his and Paape’s Luc Orient was one.
Luc Orient has the traditional three man band structure of many European adventure comics, with Luc Orient as the smart, strong, straight but slightly bland leading man, professor Hugo Kala as the brain and occasional comic relief, less physical than Orient but still a man of action and finally Lora, Kala’s secretary and Luc’s friend/love interest, feisty, independent and not nearly as often kidnap bait than e.g. Sue Storm used to be. All three work for Eurocrystal, the leading European science laboratory, in which capacity they go on strange adventures. What sets it apart is that from the start the series was orientated (sorry) towards science fiction, as well as running multiple album storylines at a time when most European series solely dealt with standalone stories.
I discovered Luc Orient in the same way I read most comics as a child: through the local library, together with series like Valerian and Les naufragés du temps. Of those three Luc Orient was the easiest to get into, thanks in no small part to Paape’s artwork. At first sight it looks slightly flat, a bit stilted in its composition and with stiff figures, but if you give it a change you’ll find out that this is a deliberate stylistic choices and that it works well in giving an grounding of realism to these science fictional stories. He was great at drawing technology, real or imagined, some of his design sense surely influencing later science fiction series.
Luc Orient was and is one of my favourite science fiction comic series and I still love the look of Paape’s artwork. For me, Paape was one of the cartoonists who defined what modern Franco-Belgian comics from the late sixties would look like.
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