It’s most probably my personal idiosyncratic frame of reference, but off late I’ve noticed at least two classic Franco-belgian comics featuring characters that are blatant references to real people, except that those people were still children at best at the time the comics were published.
The first one (above), is from the excellent Lucky Luke album Lucky Luke Contre Phil de Fer. I mean, if that is not erstwhile punk god and teenage heartthrob Feargal Sharkey, I don’t know who this is. Except that, of course, the Lucky Luke fought (and killed) Phil de Fer back in 1956, while Feargal was only born in 1958…
The second one features Acelin, the sinister squire from the Johan Et Pirlouit album, L’Anneau Des Castellac, who plots against his lord, the Duc De Castellac (and is the book’s real villain). One may also see in him a long-lost twin of Professor Snape as played by Alan Rickman (who, as it turns out, is not). Again, the Johan Et Pirlouit story was first published in Spirou Magazine in 1960, while the world only got to know what Snape looked like in 2001, when the movie version of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone (itself published in 1997) was released.
I need a lie-down (not really).
Of _course_ it was Jack Palance. That’s the whole conceit. Now I really have to lay down for a moment.
To the first one I’d have said Jack Palance. He certainly lived at the time.