Le Rayon U

Le Rayon U (The U Ray) is a comic book written and drawn by the Belgian comics creator Edgar P. Jacobs in 1943. Publication history In 1941, the outbreak of war between Germany and the United States meant that American comic strips could no longer be imported into Nazi-occupied Europe. Alex Raymond's strip, Flash Gordon, was then being published in the Belgian Franco-Belgian comics magazine Bravo. Artist and former opera singer, Edgar Pierre Jacobs was therefore asked to bring the current story to a satisfactory conclusion, which he did. He was then commissioned to produce a science fiction comic strip of his own. Le Rayon U ("The U-Ray") began serial publication in Bravo in 1943. This version had text boxes which described the action and the dialogues in the style of many Belgian comics of the time, similar in a way to Hal Foster's version of Tarzan and Prince Valiant. In 1974 Jacobs reformatted Le Rayon U in order to include speech bubbles. This version was published in Tintin magazine and in book form by Dargaud-Le Lombard.