Editing Blueberry (comics) (section)

====Death of a creator (1989)====
{{quote box|align=right|width=45%|quote="I have twenty completed pages, the rest consists of annotations and loose ideas...I was not quite on board with the development of the story yet, we still had not decided upon anything. There were some great ideas, which needed to be finalized".|salign=right|source=—Giraud, August 1989, on the script status of "Arizona Love" at the time of Charlier's death.<ref name="arizona">[[#Sources|Sadoul, 1991, p. 164]]</ref>}}
On 10 July 1989, Jean-Michel Charlier passed away from a heart condition after a short illness. By all accounts Charlier had been a [[workaholic]] throughout his career, working simultaneously on as much as a dozen projects at any given time, steadily increasing his workload as he grew older. His heart condition had already troubled him in his later years and his death, while sudden, was not entirely a surprise.<ref>[[#Sources|Ratier, 2013, p. 299]]</ref> Charlier's penchant for hard work increasingly became a concern for Giraud when he visited his longtime co-worker six months before his death: "He was a work bulimic! There were always seven to eight scenarios underway. His life was a true path of self-destruction. You should have seen him working at his desk! Six months before his passing, I advised him to slow down. Very artistically, he replied: ''No, I have chosen this!''"<ref name="bosser68">[[#Sources|Bosser, 2005, p. 68]]</ref>

Charlier, having been of a previous generation, conservative in nature and wary of science fiction in general, had never understood what his younger colleague tried to achieve as "Mœbius". Nonetheless, he never tried to hinder Giraud in the least, as he understood that an artist of Giraud's caliber needed a "mental shower" from time to time. Furthermore, Charlier was very appreciative of the graphic innovations Giraud ported over from his work as "Mœbius" into the mainstream ''Blueberry'' series, most specifically "Nez Cassé", making him "one of the all-time greatest artists in the comic medium", as Charlier himself worded it in 1982.<ref name="bree41">[[#Sources|de Bree, 1982, pp. 23, 41-43]]</ref> Artist {{ill|Michel Rouge|fr}}, who was taken on by Giraud in 1980 for the inks of "La longue marche" ("The Long March") painted a slightly different picture though. Already recognizing that the two men were living in different worlds, he noted that Charlier was not pleased with Giraud taking on an assistant, afraid that it might have been a prelude to him leaving the series in order to pursue his "experimentations" as Mœbius further.<ref>[[#Sources|Svane, 2003, p. 69]]</ref> Even Giraud was in later life led to believe that Charlier apparently "detested" his other work, looking upon it as something akin to "treason", though his personal experiences with the author was that he had kept an "open mind" in this regard, at least in his case.<ref name="flip">[[#Sources|Sadoul, 2015, pp. 220-226]]</ref> While Charlier was willing to overlook Giraud's wanderings in his case only, he was otherwise of the firm conviction that artists, especially his own, should totally and wholeheartedly devote themselves to their craft &ndash; as Charlier always had considered the comic medium &ndash; but which was somewhat incongruous on his part as he himself was habitually engaged in several divergent projects at any given time.<ref name="hoff"/> This has caused many of his artists problems on a frequent basis, as he was consistently and notoriously late with his piecemeal provided script pages, including Giraud at the start of his ''Blueberry'' career. However, as he recognized quite early on that ''Blueberry'' occupied a special place in his body of work, he later made sure that (only) his ''Blueberry'' artists were provided with scripts in a timely fashion.<ref name=artists/> Charlier's method of working came at a cost, as his scripts frequently contained continuity errors on the detail level, and which included those of ''Blueberry'', such as in his above cited instance of his hero's first name.<ref>[[#Sources|Sadoul, 1991, p. 32]]; [[#Sources|Svane, 2003, p. 46]]; [[#Sources|Ratier, 2013, p. 225]]</ref> Charlier has cited the ''Blueberry'' titles "La mine de l'allemand perdu" ("The Lost Dutchman's Mine") through "L'homme qui valait 500 000 $" ("The Half-a-Million Dollar Man") as his favorites for their "potency", both story and artwise, the latter making him the co-winner of his 1973 American [[#Awards|comic award]].<ref>[[#Sources|Berner, 2003, p. 25]]</ref>

The script being one-thirds ready at the time of Charlier's passing, the completion of "Arizona Love" was postponed as Giraud needed time to come to terms with that fact. Due to his intimate twenty-five year familiarity with both the series and its writer, it was a foregone conclusion that Giraud would from then on take on the scripting of the main series as well, especially since it was already agreed upon in the "contracts signed with Jean-Michel" that "the survivor would take over the series".<ref name="flip"/> It was this circumstance that has led Philippe Charlier, son of the deceased author and now the heir and steward of his father's ''bande dessinée'' legacy, to make the unsubstantiated claim that Novedi was surreptitiously negotiating with Giraud only for the existing and future ''Blueberry'' series, intent on cutting the Charlier family out, which was incongruous as Novedi was already heading toward receivership, aside from the fact that Giraud has never even hinted at such alleged dealings and that not a single corroborating rumor has ever surfaced elsewhere in the otherwise tight-knit Franco-Belgian comic community, save for the claim Charlier Jr. himself made on that sole occasion in the comic journal ''BoDoï'' (issue 24, 1999). Furthermore, per French law, Charlier's widow Christine remained entitled to 10 percent of the revenues from the existing and subsequent post-Charlier ''Blueberry'' titles, which provided her with a "decent" living standard, according to son Philippe, effectively contradicting his own claim on the very same occasion.<ref name="fueri"/> As for Giraud, having to work without a safety net for the first time, came initially with bouts of self-doubt and second-guessing, as [[Colin Wilson (comics)|Colin Wilson]] (by then the new ''La Jeunesse de Blueberry'' artist) testified to, after a visit to Giraud in this period: "{{ill|Janet Gale|fr|lt=Janet}} and I visited Jean when he was working on "Arizona Love" &ndash; around May 1989 [sic.] I think. Some of the first pages he showed us then were radically different from the ones ultimately published in the album later on. I did not had the time to read the scripts for those pages he had shown us, but I know that Jean redid several pages entirely anew, before the album was eventually released".<ref>[[#Sources|Svane, 2013, p. 47]]; {{cite web | title=Hertekende scène in Blueberry: Arizona Love | url=https://www.stripspeciaalzaak.be/stripnieuws/hertekende-scene-blueberry-arizona-love | work=Stripspeciallzaak.be | date=16 April 2021 | language=nl | access-date=7 December 2021 | archive-date=7 December 2021 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211207091302/https://www.stripspeciaalzaak.be/stripnieuws/hertekende-scene-blueberry-arizona-love | url-status=live }}</ref> The by Giraud rejected pages were published as a bonus in the 1995 deluxe limited edition of "Mister Blueberry", a joint publication of Dargaud and Giraud's publishing house Stardom.<ref>{{cite web | title=Mister Blueberry | url=https://www.stripinfo.be/reeks/strip/74295_Blueberry_24_Mister_Blueberry | work=stripINFO.be | language=nl | access-date=2017-07-05 | archive-date=2017-08-03 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170803134219/https://www.stripinfo.be/reeks/strip/74295_Blueberry_24_Mister_Blueberry | url-status=live }}</ref>

Stunned by the sudden death of his longtime co-worker, it took Giraud nearly five years before he could bring himself to embark on ''Blueberry'' again as artist, after completing "Arizona Love". Giraud stated that the series had lost its "father", and that the "mother needed time to mourn".<ref name="bosser68"/>