Albert Weinberg , born on April 9, 1922 in Liège and died on September 29, 2011 , was a Belgian comic artist .
He was active until his old age and can still be seen practically at all major festivals in Belgium, France , Germany and Conter . Along with Jean Graton and Dino Attanasio , he is considered one of the “doyes” of the Franco-Belgian comics scene .
In his time – shortly after the Second World War – almost every cartoonist had a fairly precise vision of a very special character, which he gradually built up. With Jean Graton it was the car races and the formula cars and his hero Michel Vaillant . We probably all know Hergé ‘s hero Tintin , and Albert Uderzo and René Coscinny ‘s Gallic character certainly as well.
In the case of Albert Weinberg, it was aviation that attracted him and his great character was (and still is) the Canadian jet pilot Dan Cooper, whose adventures were first published in the Belgian magazine Tintin in 1954, before they came on the market as albums.
It started right for Albert Weinberg at the beginning of the 1950s, when he worked in the weekly “Tintin” not as a cartoonist, but as a scenarist among others for Paul Cuvelier (1923-1978, cartoonist of Corentin) , Victor Hubinon (1924-1979) , cartoonist of Buck Danny) , Willy Maltaite(Will) (1927-2000, author of Tif et Tondu) and especially for Hergé , for whom Weinberg wrote a large part of the scenery for Tintin’s album “On a marché sur la lune “ wrote. For the screenwriter Jean-Michel Charlier (1924-1989) he helped Victor Hubinon draw the strip “Tarawa – Atoll sanglant” in 1950.
Even then he had a passion for aviation, and a few years later he invented the character of Dan Cooper, and from 1954 Cooper’s adventures were told over the years in more than 2000 plates and 41 comic strips. He virtually identified himself with Dan Cooper and was at home as a private man in the domain of aviation in its various aspects.
He was an active diver in his youth, visited a sick air base, talked to pilots, flew in jets, looked around on aircraft carriers and was also often in the air with the balloon. He was interested in the technology of airplanes, in the uniforms and overalls of the pilots, and also in their special markings. Dan Cooper had his adventures all over the world and Albert Weinberg visited almost every country in which his character was active.
What Weinberg is particularly credited with is the researched precision with which he reproduced all the technical details in his comics. In 1956, Weinberg – in addition to his work on Dan Cooper – published the story “Le professeur est distrait” in Tintin as an artist together with René Coscinny (1926-1977, screenwriter of Astérix and Oumpahpah etc.) .
Weinberg’s design for Dan Cooper’s jet, the “Triangle Bleu” , was specially checked and corrected by Sabena engineers “so that it could really fly”. Albert Weinberg’s greatest satisfaction is that his character – Dan Cooper as a Canadian jet pilot – was given a place of honor in the “Musée de l’Air” in the “Hall of Fame” in Edmonton (Canada).
Albert Weinberg never gets tired of drawing, and many of his fans can confirm that he takes books to the hotel in the evenings at festivals to dedicate them there, because he doesn’t want to let his followers go home without them.
