MYTHCOMICS: DELIRIUS (1972)

Phillippe Druillet's best known character, "Lone Sloane," debuted in 1972 and soon became one of French comics' leading misanthropic protagonists. I've not read the character's very first adventure but recently read the half-dozen stories collected in "Les Six Voyages de Lone Sloane." That title may have been meant to invoke the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and in fact the last story in this series briefly references the forthcoming events of DELIRIUS, so in that context one could view the longer story as Sloane's seventh voyage.

The six stories are erratically plotted, usually dropping the hero into this or that dire situation, which is usually resolved in some elliptical fashion. Sloane is established as some sort of "rebel" opposed to his own people, the descendants of Earthmen who have colonized the usual endless galaxies. The hero is entirely self-interested, ruthless about dealing with anyone who gives him crap, and looks like an ordinary man, except for having red eyes. The stories are largely just excuses for Druillet to exercise his fabulous design sense, filling pages with titanic spaceships and robots, towering buildings with weird baroque architecture, and a variety of grotesque aliens. I assume that Druillet wrote all the short tales himself, but for the longer DELIRIUS, he teamed up with one Jacques Lob, which gave the resulting story more of a conventional plot.

Sloane and the crew of his ship, the "O Sidharta," have long been in the disfavor of the reigning Galactic Emperor Shaan, but lately they've also been dogged by other ships. Sloane and his second-in-command, a Martian named Yearl, figure out that the newcomers belong to a priesthood named the Red Redemption that dwells on Delirius, the pleasure planet. Delirius began as a barren world that was useless for colonization. (The above panorama shows a large replica of an astronaut's suit on display, and any high ideals that it might have signified have been undercut by the bird poop covering the helmet.) Shaan therefore structured Delirius into a casino-world, whose only purpose is to separate jaded citizens from their money, thus swelling the emperor's coffers. 

The Red Priests confer with Sloane. They want him to help them steal the treasure-trove of Delirius from the clutches of Governor Kadenborg. The priests claim that they want to overthrow both Kadenborg and Sloane's enemy Shaan, but Sloane has heard that they work a protection racket on the businesses of Delirius, so their word isn't worth much. Nevertheless, the payoff tempts Sloane, and he agrees. He and Yearl begin a reconnaissance on the pleasure planet, but they're almost immediately betrayed by the priests and imprisoned.

Almost as quickly, the two thieves are also liberated by an unknown benefactor.  They escape prison in a ship and take refuge in "The Gluon," a dry ocean-bed where Delirius deposits all of its garbage. (I assume the name is an ironic reference to a quantum physics term, coined in 1962, for a type of subatomic particle.) This visit is a brief one, probably just an excuse for Druillet to draw a big trash-heap. Agents of the mysterious benefactor show up to give the duo clothes, but no information on their boss's motives. 

Sloane and Yearl wander around rather aimlessly, which gives Druillet the chance to draw more exotic stuff, like various combatants in arena-games and "mystical masochists," though neither has anything to do with the main story. Another of their peregrinations takes them into a building designed to homage M.C. Escher, where they meet a prostitute named Saarah. 

But this meeting is not coincidental; Saarah works for the Red Redemption. The reader finally gets an explanation for the reason the priests betrayed Sloane and Yearl to the cops: that they knew the duo would be tagged by "the intuitives" (whoever they are) and so the priests stage-managed both the capture and liberation of their partner-pawns. By having the Earthman and the Martian become fugitives, the priests made it possible for them to penetrate Delirius.

Sloane, however, figures out that the Red Priests want to use him and his crew as fall guys, so that they can topple Kadenborg and take his place under the Emperor's aegis, rather than seeking to end the corruption of Delirius. Sloane therefore cooperates with them on heisting the treasure, but chooses his own game plan, bearding the governor in his den. (Kadenborg, incidentally, is drawn to look like a sort of "blob-man," making him a E.T. version of a "fat cat.") 

In the end, though Sloane secures for himself and his crew a large portion of the haul, he also contributes to the downfall of a world devoted only to filthy lucre: by allowing some of the "credos" to fall to the planet's surface, everyone on Delirius starts to fight over "literal free money." (Writer Lob might have mentioned that this is the implicit promise of all of the world's gambling-dens, but maybe he considered it implicit.) As Sloane and his crew escape with the Emperor's money, Sloane distances his pecuniary mission from that of the priests' alleged desire for revolution.

This pseudo-revolution is no benefit to anyone, except those who want to take advantage of the chaos and snatch a bigger piece of the pie.

Lob and Druillet may have patterned DELIRIUS after the still popular spaghetti westerns of the period. In most of these movies, the hero is a badass who similarly resorts to stealing huge sums of money from corrupt regimes, often with the help of cohorts who plan to betray him, thus justifying his cutting them out of the bounty. If he helps the downtrodden, it's usually by dumb luck, since the spaghetti-hero is out for himself alone. Many of these flicks might be deemed "indirect revolutionary propaganda," since they justify striking back at entrenched interests, even if the protagonist's motive is making money. Sloane's final lines suggest that he's more of a disillusioned idealist, since he gained his fame for having rebelled against the emperor, though I doubt he ever caught the idealism-bug in earlier or later adventures.

As a minor point of literary history, it might not be coincidence that the name of Sloane's Martian buddy "Yearl" resembles that of "Yarol," the Venusian accomplice of C.L. Moore's "space western" hero Northwest Smith. The Moore stories were written in the 1930s but reprinted in the early 1950s. Thus it's not impossible that Lob or Druillet read some or all of the Smith stories and, consciously or not, paid homage to an earlier space-badass.