The Alliance of the Curious is a French comic that tells a modern day adventure story that begins by accident and ends on a shaggy dog anticlimax.
The story opens during the 2007 heat wave in Paris, when many people, especially the elderly, are dying of the heat. One poor old woman's death, after her adult son is arrested while buying her bottled lemonade sets everything else in motion.
The king of France has died, and his son is set to inherit the fortune, but it turns out the old woman was a direct descendant of a Carolingian king, so her son has the best claim to inherit the dead king's entire fortune. The furious prince hires the Cocaine Sisters, three skinny blonde women who spend the whole comic in their underwear, to find and kill this rival heir.
The hotel where the old woman was living sells all her stuff. An antiques dealer and his girlfriend buy an armoire to refurbish. Inside, the find a clay head that holds an elaborately bejeweled skull. They take it to an appraiser, who gets the relic DNA tested and makes an astonishing discovery. The bone fragment he scraped from the skull shows it's a Neanderthal who died thousands of years ago. The hair he found inside too is only days old, and belongs to a still-living Neanderthal! The antique dealer, his girlfriend, and the appraiser form the Alliance of the title to try to find the man.
Meanwhile, the adult son of the old lady (the secret Neanderthal) gets out of jail and learns that she's dead and he's evicted. He meets some homeless men who invite him to join their camp under a bridge. He starts having ancestral memories - of a 1900 flood that ruined his insurance-selling family, to the battle where his Carolingian ancestor became king, eventually to the decision by his Neanderthal tribe to form a secret community hidden amidst humanity. He is drawn to steal back his mother's corpse, and to retrieve the reliquary skull.
So then, the Alliance does detective work to find this poor guy. The Cocaine Sisters manage to keep finding everyone too. They give chase in a sports car and spend a lot of time bickering and firing giant guns with bad aim. Eventually the Alliance and the last living Neanderthal end up in a cool-looking ossuary where every Neanderthal in the secret community has come to die for thousands of years.
They all learn a prophecy that if the bejeweled skull is put back on the shaman's skeleton after his last descendant dies, then all the bones will rise as an army to crush humanity. The poor guy dies then too, and the Alliance decides ... to not put the skull back. Just in case. We see on the news that the jerk prince gets the fortune after all, and gets engaged to the last surviving Cocaine Sister (their aim was really bad.)
I realize that the elements of this sound kind of cool, and you might still enjoy the ride. I disliked how much the plot relies of coincidental meetings, and I found the Cocaine Sisters insufferably annoying. Plus the ending was such a letdown.
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