Created by Ted Benoit
Pseudonym of Thierry Benoît
(1949-2016)
En fin!
A P.I. with appeal!
RAY BANANA is a post-modernist American private eye, as imagined by the French in the eighties in a series of quirky, offbeat bandes dessinées.
He’s a slouching hepcat shamus in retro-fifties gear, shades and attitude, who stars in a series of semi-futuristic sort of detective stories, set in a mythical America that could only be imagined in Europe. He plies his trade in Métropolis, a city that bears a rather suspicious similarity to Los Angeles. Or maybe Miami? There are palm trees.
But is he really a private eye, or just a snappily dressed shit magnet who stumbles into stuff? He doesn’t seem to have any paying clients, but he’s not hurting for bucks, tooling around town in classy, cool-as-fuck cars, and favoring Ray-Ban shades. Day or night.
Regardless of his official occupation, he regularly tangled with gangsters, foreign agents, troublesome cops, swanky nightclubs, car thieves, assorted thugs, bizarre cults, and (why not?) crackpot scientists. All vaguely noir, all certainly tongue-in-cheek.
Ray made his debut in the pages of the French comic mag (À suivre), and appeared in several collections (albums) in both French and occasionally English, sometimes accompanied by his femme de chambre, Thelma Ritter.
C’est bien cool…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Benoit (real name: Thierry Benoît), was a French cartoonist, best known for his clean, uncluttered art style known in French as la ligne claire, whose work appeared a number of French comic magazines, such as Geranonymo, Métal hurlant, L‘Écho des savanes, Libération and (À suivre). Other works include Bingo Bongo et son Combo Congolais (1987) and the three (or is it four?) tomes of the noir pastiche series Ray Banana. He also illustrated two volumes of the famous French comic series Blake et Mortimer by Jean Van Hamme.
BANDES DESSINEES
- (À SUIVRE)
Art and text: Ted Benoit
Ray made his debut in 1980.
ALBUMS
- Berceuse électrique (1982; translated as “The Electric Cradle”)
- Cité lumière (1986; translated as “City of Light”)
- L’homme de Nulle Part 1 (1989; first of “The Thelma Ritters Memoirs”)
- L’homme qui ne transpirait pas: Une journée dans la vie de Ray Banana (1994; translated as “The Man Who Didn’t Sweat. A Day in the Life of Ray Banana”) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESIGATION
- ZUT! (to come)
Private Eyes in European comic books, strips, graphic novels, albums & bandes déssinées.
THE DICK OF THE DAY
- September 9, 2026
THE BOTTOM LINE: The quintessential post-modern American private eye, as imagined by the French in a series of quirky, offbeat and very tongue-in-cheek bandes dessinées from the 1980s. Cool is the rule here, with hep cat Ray, in his retro-fifties gear and perpetual Ray-Bans (of course), driving a variety of classic cars, fighting the good fight. C’est bien cool.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
