PARIS — There are two Pierre Dragons.
Pierre Dragon, comic book hero, prowls the shadows of Paris leading a police intelligence unit on the trail of terrorists. He sweats through all-night stakeouts. He wolfs meals in greasy kebab joints. He slams a thug through a plate-glass window during a neon-lit barroom brawl.
The second Pierre Dragon resembles the illustrated cop. He's also a 41-year-old ex-commando. A 21-year police veteran whose first brush with terrorism came in the subterranean carnage of a bombing that killed eight people at a train station here in 1995. A son of Spanish immigrants who is swarthy and brawny enough to operate in Middle Eastern and North African underworlds.
Pierre Dragon is the nom de plume and alter ego of an active-duty anti-terrorism chief who has become the first cop in France, and perhaps anywhere, to write a comic book based on his real-life adventures. This May, a respected Paris publishing house scored a hit with a graphic novel that brings together two quintessentially French institutions: the BD and the RG.
Because the French like to use acronyms, often without throwing foreigners an explanatory bone, that's how a newspaper here would sum up the story. But for the rest of us, BD stands for Bande Dessinee, a genre of hardback comic book that is a huge industry here. RG is Renseignements Generaux, or General Intelligence, the domestic espionage division of the national police long permeated with an aura of secrecy and power.
" 'RG' are the two little letters that have always struck fear," said the author, whose real name remains a secret on orders of his bosses. "I wanted to show the secret workings of that world. The daily life of a unit that works in anti-terrorism. Investigations, surveillance, but also life outside: shopping, family problems, kids."
The first issue of the series is titled "RG: Riyadh on the Seine." Dragon and Frederik Peeters, the Swiss illustrator, depict the tedium, tension and occasional adrenaline blasts of anti-terrorism work. They decode the argot: "tonton," or "uncle," means informant; "planque," or "hide-out," means a surveillance safe house; "serrer," or "grip," means to arrest. They reveal tricks of the trade: Fearing that a suspect under surveillance has spotted him and his partner in a parked taxi, Dragon calls in uniformed officers to roust them at gunpoint and preserve his cover.
