Jim Cutlass is a Franco-Belgian comic book series created by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud (Mœbius), creators of the more famous western Blueberry. The first album appeared in 1979, and the seventh and final in 1999, it was started due to a legal dispute over the rights to Blueberry, and is a Western sharing many of the characteristics, but taking place in the Deep South instead of the west. Jim Cutlass, a lieutenant in the US Army and a veteran of the Civil War, returns from the army to maintain the plantation he has inherited along with his cousin, Carolyn (whom he is also in love with). After leaving the care of his plantation to Carolyn, Cutlass returns to the army, and becomes entwined in a plot to creak down on a crime movement led by two key characters in The Klan, Don Clay and Playcard, and at the same time becoming involved in hunting the shadowy White Alligator, a mysterious voodoo practitioner holding an immense power over black people in the south.
Towards the end of his life, Moebius talked about finally doing a crossover between Cutlass and Blueberry, but Died During Production put an end to those plans.
Contains examples of the following tropes:
- Animal Assassin: While Cutlass is in prison, Playcard attempts to dispatch him with a moccasin snake. Though you would expect this to be due to Complexity Addiction, Cutlass notes that it is a brilliant plan, the snake would never be seen by anyone, and Cutlass would be dead in the morning without a sound.
- The Beastmaster: The White Alligator. He controls a literal white alligator, of immense size.
- Big Bad: Don Clay and The White Alligator for different clans.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Playcard, who clearly believes himself and Clay to be a Big Bad Duumvirate, and behaves as a complete Smug Snake accordingly.
- The Brute: McKee, the brutal sergent from the army, who actually works for Clay, and takes a personal hate to Cutlass.
- Despair Event Horizon: For Woodrow, The White Alligators murder of an innocent family. It caused him to lose faith in the cause.
- The Dreaded: The White Alligator, both the person and the actual alligator.
- Evil Is Bigger: Clay. The White Alligator also absolutely towers over everyone else.
- Jerkass Gods: the ancestral African spirits. They engineered slave trade to America so they could set foot there. No wonder the White Alligator hates them with a vengeance.
- Kissing Cousins: Cutlass and Carolyn.
- The Klan: Run by Playcard and Clay as a cover up for their criminal activities, against The White Alligator.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: Given the setting, alligators is a must. But The White Alligator (the reptile, not the person), serves a special mention. To iterate, it is an enormous albino alligator, revered as a creature of the swamp, feared by anyone, and probably controlled by The White Alligator. When Cutlass is abandoned in the swamp by Woodrow, normal alligators surround his canoe. He reassures himself that they would never be able to overturn it, and then he sees this creature on the bank. Oh, Crap! does not even begin to describe his reaction when it enters the water, easily overturns his canoe, forces him to flee into a tree, and then starts cutting down the tree to get to him.
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: The White Alligator.
- Nightmare Sequence: Cutlass' nightmare involving The White Alligator is terrifying. It starts with him happily envisioning his marriage with Carolyn, when suddenly The White Alligator (reptile) bursts in, grows to deinosuchus like length, and wreaks Cutlass' plantation. Then its master appears, and takes away Carolyn to marry her himself, while she is induced in a very scary zombie-like trance. And apparently The White Alligator has the power to instill this into people at will.
- Oh, Crap!: Cutlass gets an absolutely epic one when he sees The White Alligator (the reptile), watching him from a riverbank.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Clay and Playcard are obvious, being members of The Klan and all, The White Alligator, with his vast anti-white obsessions, is a lighter example.
- Rogue Agent: Cutlass, after being Wrongly Accused for the murder of a prostitute.
- Scary Black Man: The White Alligator, despite being an albino.
- Super-Persistent Predator: The White Alligator. When Cutlass flees up a tree, the alligator quite literally destroys the tree to get to him.
- Three-Way Sex: In Thunder In The South, Clay has sex with two black slaves while being interrupted by Playcard.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Apparently, The White Alligator intends to create a nation exclusively for black people, which at this time was a viable option as they were still held in tight poverty and racism in the south, while it would be considered blatant racism today.
