New album: Beer puts pressure on Lucky Luke

Wind of panic in the Wild West: a gigantic strike paralyzes all American breweries, drying up the saloons. Passing through New Munich, a Dakota town created by German settlers, Lucky Luke is called to the rescue. In order to ease tensions between Marxist trade unionists and industrial barons, he will have to go to Milwaukee, the American capital of beer.

For the first time, the solitary cowboy finds himself confronted with industrial modernity, a world of factories and assembly line work radically different from the wide open spaces he loves. Hired against his will by a major brewer, he is overwhelmed by the throes of a social conflict that is beyond his control. And it doesn’t get better when the Daltons get involved…

Historical facts

For ten years that he has been writing the scripts for Lucky Luke, Jul has liked to root his stories in historical facts, while giving voice to a community that helped forge the United States. After Jewish culture (“The Promised Land”) and racial segregation towards blacks (“A Cowboy in Cotton”), he became interested in immigrants of Germanic origin in “A Cowboy Under Pressure”, new opus as pleasant as it is well documented.

Under the guise of humor, Jul reveals that Goethe’s language almost became the official language of an America that welcomed a considerable number of Germans from the 18th century^e century. Among them, a certain Frederick Trump, grandfather of the indescribable Donald, as well as an Eisenhauer family, whose name would be transformed into Eisenhower. There is president in the air, but also hamburgers, ketchup and hot dogs, all symbols of the “American way of life” imported by German immigrants.

Forced labor

In Milwaukee, Lucky Luke also discovers one of the first traffic lights in history. The strikes depicted in the album did indeed exist in the 19th century.^e century, as well as the forced labor of prisoners, with certain bosses not hesitating to use this free labor to speed up work in factories. The opportunity for Jul to slip in a few allusions to the German occupation and the STO (Compulsory Labor Service) of sinister memory.

Even today, 70% of the inhabitants of Dakota or Minnesota are of German origin. The screenwriter of Lucky Luke was able to verify it in situ. The new album was inspired by a trip to the United States with the Arte channel, following in the footsteps of lonesome poor cowboy. Exciting, the documentary “In the Boots of Lucky Luke” remains visible until June 30, 2025 on arte.tv.

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