Lucky Luke: Project Introduction

This project started back in 2008, when I learned Atlas were doing a 28/30mm Lucky Luke collection in prepainted lead (with some resin accessories).

For the uninitiated, Lucky Luke is a humorous comics series created by Belgian cartoonist Morris in 1946. The series takes place in the American Old West and features the titular Lucky Luke, a cowboy known as the "man who shoots faster than his shadow", accompanied by his horse Jolly Jumper. Lucky Luke is charged with restoring justice to the Old West by chasing down bandits, the most famous of whom are the Dalton Brothers. The stories are filled with humorous elements parodying the Western genre and feature many famous personalities of the period.

The Daltons really could catch no break...

Having learnd of these figures, I immediately went to the Editions Atlas site, but alas, it seemed the collection was only available in France. So I went the ebay route and found an auction that had a nice selection of miniatures from the range and figured I'd get these now and depending on how enthused I remained about the project, would subscribe to the collection when it became available over here.

Basically the collection consists (miniatures wise, it also comes with DVD's of the cartoon version) of 50-ish characters, some resin buildingfronts and some metal and/or resin accessories. This is the initial lot I got off Ebay:

A modest first step onto the road to madness

Now, as is the case with the oop Pixi ranges, Atlas miniatures tend to be smothered in several layers of badly applied thick paint, obliterating all the details. To give you an idea, here are the figures lined up (click to enlarge).

Makes you wonder how they can even breathe...

After stripping (the paint comes off relatively easy), they will look like this.

Now that looks much nicer, doesn't it?

And for size, a comparison with a 28mm Artizan Designs Wild West figure.

The Artizan cowboy seems a bit weary of those weird looking freaks.

After that, repainting turned out to yield some much better looking characterful figures (see next post), so I tracked down the rest of the Atlas range, with some spares for conversions, and complemented them with some choice sets from the fully compatible similar Pixi range (although partly OOP and more pricey): Pixi Lucky Luke miniatures