Whatever Happened to Henri Duval?

A comics tragedy!

Comics creators, especially at the big companies, are believers in “reduce, reuse, recycle.” And that's good news for the characters they create! If they have any claim to fame as part of the companies’ history, then even if they die—or, worse, fail to sell comics—there’s always a decent chance someone will bring them back someday.

Except, it seems, if they’re Henri Duval.

Henri Duval is a hot-blooded Frenchman who ends up saving the king's life, which would need a lot of saving in Duval’s few pages of existence. Duval’s happy to do it, though: he’s a devoted royalist and smitten with Cecile, the king’s young female companion.

(Is she the king’s daughter? Attendant? Queen? Mistress? Unknown—there’s no historical Cecile associated with the French royal family. The authors probably meant her to be his daughter or attendant, though, since that’d give Henri a clearer shot at winning her heart.)

Duval fights to protect the king against phony musketeers. (We don’t know which king this is either, but the musketeer detail suggests Louis XIII.)

Apologies for the condition of the scans below; they’re the best available—and I wouldn’t want to hold out on you.

The faux musketeers catch and imprison Duval, though the king and Cecile escape...

...and that's the last installment of his story, which only went on for five installments, totaling six pages in length. One imagines he died in prison.

His last words? “But I don't understand.”

You've probably never heard of Monsieur Duval, but he has one of the best pedigrees a comics character could get. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, created Henri first. In fact, he was their first published comic-book character—or tied for first, depending on how you count.

New Fun #6, published in 1935, included two features by Siegel and Shuster: Henri Duval and Doctor Occult, the Ghost Detective. The latter series, about a mortal paranormal investigator who used magical tools now and then, went on much longer than Duval's did. And Doctor Occult still shows up in DC Comics today.

But the Duval feature did come first in the issue, so Duval was older than his twin, even if only by a few minutes.

Siegel and Shuster used a few pen names in their early careers, as did many comics pros back then. But in their case, the record is clear. They’d go on to create other stories about heroic feds and cops (likewise forgotten, but not as firsty) before their dream project, Superman, finally sold and started to eat up all their time.

There was another wrinkle to Duval’s story, though it may feel like adding insult to injury. Another character named “Henri Duval” appeared in Doctor Occult, an artist who commits murders by painting his victims’ deaths. This second Duval died after one four-page installment, but his appearance shows that his creators had given up on Henri Duval and were stripping it for parts. “May as well use the name! Not like we’re gonna do anything else with it”:

Nobody argues Henri Duval was Siegel and Shuster's most compelling work. It reads like a riff on The Three Musketeers that didn’t involve much research into how royalist France looked or operated. Still, you can see the creators’ gift for adventure yarns come through on the pages, even though the condition of some scans is poor.

And Duval has the honor of introducing Siegel and Shuster to the comics-buying public. For that, the comics world, and Superman in particular, owe him a debt of gratitude.

It'd be nice for Superman to one day address the plight of his creative cousin, either by pulling off some kind of time-travel rescue...or else by just laying his ghost to rest.