Fabled comic book hero Michel Vaillant returns to Macau

Cover of the new book

The fabled comic book hero Michel Vaillant is set to return to Macau for the new episode of his racing adventures. The book cover was presented yesterday during the press conference where it was announced that the book launch will happen in November during the Macau Grand Prix event.

The plot decision was made by storywriter Philippe Garton, who is both one of the book authors and the son of the original creator of the character back in 1957, Jean Graton. As the storywriter explained during the press conference held as part of the program of The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, the idea of bringing the character back to Macau was planted after Philippe Graton’s participation as a guest in last year’s Festival, where he exhibited photographs and a display of the original prints of the comic book.

For the author, this book is an opportunity to “break in” to markets “where traditional Franco-Belgian comics always had difficulty to get in.” Franco-Belgian comics stand in contrast to the other two main types of these comic culture (the American Super Heroes stories led by Marvel and the Japanese Manga) that have won widespread popularity around the world.“It is a unique opportunity as there is a huge cultural gap between the French-Belgium graphic novels and the American comics and the Japanese Manga and that’s what we are trying to do by reaching the Asian markets and namely the China market. It is something that the huge European publishers could never do with all the resources they possess,” Graton said.

Not wanting to unveil much of the actual action, Graton advanced that for this new season, which he started in 2012, “I wanted to move from the old stories that had a different public. Readers now are more educated, [knowledgeable] not exactly kids but racing fans and even kids are more knowledgeable forcing us to perfect our story details,” Graton said. He went on to note that such facts influenced this new comic greatly as, for example, “regulations [for Formula 3 race] only allow drivers with a maximum age of 26 and Michel Vaillant can hide his age [physically] but would make no sense to put him in a role of a racer, so we decided to give him another role and we came up with another way for him to continue to be the main protagonist of the story.”

According to Graton, the book will read more as a double-story that unfolds simultaneously, on and off the racetrack in the “relevant places of the true Macau,” he said.

For the creation of such a story, the authors were in Macau during last year’s Macau Grand Prix working very closely with the team that featured French racer Sacha Fenestraz and during the event, a Michel Vaillant livery was used on his Dallara-Volkswagen, which was prepared by Carlin Motorsports. The director of the Literary Festival, Ricardo Pinto, who moderated the talk, noted on the topic: “One of our aims with this festival is to try as much as possible to be the origin or the start of new projects whenever you have guests here and this was one project that was born here at the Literary Festival.”

For Graton, it is “touching” that the comics created by his father 60 years ago “still raise so much interest, maybe because these kind of heroes never get old, they keep on moving with the contemporary world.” Graton added, “Michel Vaillant has been racing against Fangio and other big drivers from the 1950’s and now on the next adventure he will face the young talents on the Macau Grand Prix.”

Philippe Graton