Johnny Hazard #1
This album — titled Ciel d'Enfer! and numbered #1 in Éditions Gilou's short-lived French reprint line — represents the most sustained French-language attempt of the mid-1980s to bring Frank Robbins' complete newspaper adventure strip to a bande dessinée readership, arriving eight years after the strip's American run ended in 1977. Robbins' Johnny Hazard, which launched on June 5, 1944 — one day before D-Day — is a direct antecedent to Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon in the aviator-adventurer genre, and the Gilou series gave Francophone collectors their first properly formatted album edition of that material since the sporadic Humanoïdes Associés release of 1983. French BD critics noted Robbins' distinctively high-contrast black-and-white ink work as a clear evolution of the Caniff/Sickles school, and the Gilou run helped cement Robbins' reputation in Europe as a craftsman of serious narrative art rather than simply a crossover figure known for Batman and the Invaders.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Frank Robbins created *Johnny Hazard* for King Features Syndicate after declining that syndicate's offer to take over *Secret Agent X-9*, choosing instead to develop his own original aviation strip; it ran continuously from June 5, 1944 to August 20, 1977. Robbins simultaneously illustrated for *Life*, *Look*, and *The Saturday Evening Post* throughout the 1940s, and in 1977 retired to Mexico to pursue painting full-time. French publication of the strip had been sporadic for decades — small pamphlet editions through Éditions des Remparts appeared as early as the late 1960s, followed by a Focus volume in 1979 and a Humanoïdes Associés album in 1983 — making the Gilou series of 1985–1986 the first coherent multi-volume reprint programme in French. Éditions Gilou published three albums in the run (*Ciel d'Enfer!*, *Objectif Danger*, and *Jeux Mortels*) before the line ended, and the series sat dormant in French until a Glénat volume appeared years later.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published July 1985 by Éditions Gilou (Paris); titled *Ciel d'Enfer!* ('Hell in the Sky'); black-and-white, softcover, approximately 90–102 pages in a standard album format (225 × 295 mm).
- Sole creator credit: Frank Robbins (September 9, 1917 – November 28, 1994), who wrote, drew, and lettered all *Johnny Hazard* material.
- Although labeled #1 in the Gilou series, French BD databases (Bédetheque, BDGest) catalogue it as the fourth French-language *Johnny Hazard* album overall, preceded by Éditions des Remparts (1976), Focus (1979), and Humanoïdes Associés (1983).
- The underlying newspaper strip debuted June 5, 1944 — one day before the D-Day landings — for King Features Syndicate, and ran for 33 years until August 20, 1977.
- Robbins chose to create *Johnny Hazard* instead of taking over *Secret Agent X-9* when King Features made that offer; the strip was therefore his entirely original property.
- Robbins developed a visually distinctive style over the strip's run, beginning under the influence of Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff, but evolving toward bold expressionistic inking that set the strip apart from its peers.
- Éditions Gilou published two further albums in the same series: *Objectif Danger* and *Jeux Mortels*, both April 1986, before the line concluded.
- The strip was later subject to comprehensive English-language archival reprinting by Hermes Press beginning in 2011, with separate hardcover volumes for daily and Sunday strips; 1,090 original Robbins strips are held in the Frank Robbins Collection at Syracuse University.
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