Review by Ian Keogh
The Bluecoats is an American Civil War comedy. That’s generated the humour for every volume translated into English so far, which makes it surprising that Duel in the Channel opens with Blutch and Chesterfield aboard a vessel docking in Amsterdam. How they came to be on the boat is comically devised by Raoul Cauvin when related in flashback, and the ship’s mission is to locate and sink a Confederate ship causing considerable trouble raiding along the US shoreline.
As shown on the sample art, Willy Lambil delights in drawing a few pages of 19th century Amsterdam, but his bread and butter work is the excellent cartooning bringing Blutch and Chesterfield, and indeed everyone else to life. By the original 1995 European publication date he’d been working on The Bluecoats for over twenty years and knew the characters inside and out, so just like revisiting the Asterix cast, there’s a constant delight in seeing a sulky Chesterfield, the mad Captain Stark and the subtly conniving Blutch go through their expressions.
For all the pleasure in that, though, there’s the dawning realisation that Cauvin’s plot may have begun well enough, but he’s having trouble packing in enough incidents to keep it going. The title explains what’s going to happen, and beyond the opening scenes there’s not enough comedy to sustain the narrative. It’s also surprising to see a page dealing with the disposal of corpses. While Stark’s charges at the enemy rack up the body count, the sequences are dealt with comedically, but there’s no laughs to be had from scenes of corpses wrapped in tarpaulin being launched overboard and then floating behind the ship. It’s followed by an equally misguided scene of Blutch attempting surgery, although the effects are shown via reactions rather than the surgery itself.
A repeated joke is Blutch and Chesterfield constantly bickering and ending up in chained in the ship’s brig, but a better joke is the ending echoing the circumstances leading to Blutch and Chesterfield’s transfer. All in all, though, not enough laughs to had.
With forthcoming volume Drummer Boy Cinebook delve deeper back in the Cauvin/Lambil catalogue where quality is generally guaranteed.
