Promoting kindness without falling into sentimentality is a complex equation in children’s literature. How to tell stories full of noble feelings where in the end morality does not prevail? This delicate balance was signed by André Jobin, known as “Job”.
Exempt from children’s speeches, its star series, yakariMade with the Swiss designer Derib, it has raised awareness among several generations of readers about such essential topics as ecology, animal protection and tolerance. From a young Indian capable of conversing with animals, Job had become an accomplice, an equal, as long as he learned to read around the age of six. The screenwriter died on October 8 in Nimes, at the age of 96.
Born on October 25, 1927 in Delémont, then canton of Bern (Switzerland), André Jobin came to comics by chance, along with his first profession, journalism. It was to fill the pages of a weekly newspaper that he had created in 1964 for schoolchildren in French-speaking Switzerland. The spectacled toadwho had grown closer to Derib (real name Claude de Ribaupierre). The latter had begun his career as a designer in the studio created in Brussels by Peyo (1928-1992), creator of smurfsbefore returning to live in Valais.
Apology for nature
Together, Job and Derib will give birth to Pythagoras, a mocking owl especially gifted in mathematics, but whose guilty pleasure is excessive drinking of exotic beverages. His adventures will be grouped, in 1969 and 1970, into two albums that Job will self-publish. In 1974, a third – published jointly by three publishers: Switzerland (24 Heures), Belgium (Rossel) and France (Fleurus) – marked the end of this series, victim of relentless internal competition, embodied by the arrival of yakari.
The young Sioux of the Iakota tribe, accompanied by his mustang Petit Tonnerre, was graphically created in 1964 by Derib, while he was working on the inking and decoration of the very smurf (9my history of the smurfs). Passionate about Indian spiritualism and great admirer of western series jerry springFrom Jijé, the designer had kept this child character in his boxes, already called Yakari, who carried a bow and arrows on his back that he would later detach.
Job will agree to accept it with three conditions: first, that the young hero defends the wild nature; second, that the stories are freed from the clichés of the western; thirdly, that in each story a different animal stands out (it will result, from the scriptwriter’s pen, a whole bestiary of beavers, white bison, bears, rabbits, wolves, coyotes, wolverines…). Placed under the escort of his totem, a bald eagle called Great Eagle, who has given him the gift of speaking with animals, Yakari will live a thousand adventures without gunshots or violence, in the heart of an environment devoid of any human threat.
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