Review by Karl Verhoven

Marcel Dalton? We’ve not seen him before among the Daltons, have we? It’s because he’s the family’s black sheep, the honest Dalton, uncle to the familiar bandits and a very successful banker in his native Switzerland. He’s visiting the USA to open his first bank in his country of birth, and thinks it might also be the opportunity for his nephews to become honest citizens, but he’s not that naive, so has Lucky Luke on hand to ensure they’re not tempted by all that money.

It turns out they’re not the threat, as Marcel’s chosen to open his bank in a town where every other bank is a Sachsman Bank, and Sachsman’s none too pleased about the competition.

Marcel Dalton is a strange Lucky Luke book. It certainly looks like Lucky Luke as Morris has been drawing the feature for years and uses all his first rate tricks, especially toward the end where the Daltons figure more often drawn in ascending height. No, it’s not the art that’s the problem, it’s the jokes. Where are the jokes my dears? Perhaps Bob De Groot was hoarding them all for his Clifton series.

De Groot exhausts his Swiss references over the opening six pages, and they’re not funny. “I’m disappointed for the better” says Marcel on meeting an immediately puzzled Luke. If the joke has to be explained in the next panel – “It’s a Swiss expression. It means I’m pleasantly surprised” – it’s not a joke. Only slightly less feeble is the succession of bandits along the route with snake aliases, each of whom has their suspenders shot away by Luke. The pay-off is there’s a suspender salesman in town. The mediocrity continues with predictable temper tantrums, explosions in banks and an age taken working to every punchline. De Groot does have one good joke up his sleeve, though, and as you’re surely not going to buy this when over seventy better Lucky Luke albums are available, we’ll tell you that it’s the former schoolteacher of the local thug always dealing with him fearlessly despite now being an old lady.

Eventually the Daltons tire of banking and revert to type, but the jokes are all provided by Morris and his great cartooning, as the Daltons robbing shop after shop isn’t funny of its own accord. Marcel eventually returns to Switzerland never to be seen again, which is just as well because more and better jokes could have been mined from him originating in Texas.

The art makes this look infinitely better than it is.