Ergün L’Errant

The brother and two sisters of Didier Comès donated to the King Baudouin Foundation the original artwork of two volumes of adventures of Ergün L’Errant: Le Dieu Vivant and Le maître des ténèbres. In so doing, they are preserving the work of this Belgian artist for future generations. Among the original artwork are the blueprints for the album Le Dieu Vivant (The Living God), the sheets that enabled colour to be applied.

Le Dieu Vivant was the first long story to be written by Comès. Initially published in 1973 in the weekly review Pilote, it appeared as an album in the following year. The story tells of the wanderings of Ergün, an earthling condemned to roam the galaxy indefinitely for having rebelled against incessant wars. He lands on a planet ruled by a ‘living god’ who dominates and oppresses the local people, whom Ergün tries to help. The follow-up to Ergün L’Errant was Le maître des ténèbres (The Master of Darkness), published in 1980 in the review (A suivre), which had also first published Silence in 1979. This new science fiction story took Ergün to the frontier between the world of the living and the world of the dead, where he would face the superior power of Lucifer. The story focuses on death in a resolutely fantastical world.

In Ergün L’Errant, Didier Comès was obliged to follow the norms of the youth press to tell a science fiction story, so his artwork was in colour, although he used this in a metaphorical manner. Thus, red underlined violence or symbolised love. Black was already playing an important role, emphasizing the drama of the story. In this first story, Comès also tackled themes that would return in his later work such as death, wandering and aging.

During the creation of Ergün L’Errant, Didier Comès thus obeyed the specificities of style associated with science fiction created for a younger audience, but his personal style was already developing and traces of this appeared in this story, although it was yet to be fully asserted.