Trapped on Zarkass

 
 

Trapped on Zarkass

by Yann

art by Didier Cassegrain

translated by Dan Christensen

adapted from the novel by Stefan Wul

Magnetic Press

1958, adapted 2022

 

 

Trapped on Zarkass is a graphic novel adaptation of a 1958 French scifi book by Stefan Wul, who's best known for another of his books that was adapted as the animated film Fantastic Planet. Reading a less-known work by a famous author can sometimes feel like discovering a hidden treasure ... or it can confirm that the better-known work is just better, full stop.

 

Zarkass is set on an alien world, where human colonizers dominate the local population of cockroach people who ride giant caterpillars. Humans believe the natives are stupid, lazy, and docile ... but their leaders might be secretly working with the unknown third-party aliens who have been terrorizing the human settlements with their indestructible triangle-shaped spaceships.

 

Marcel and Louis are human agents posing as butterfly hunters, who are secretly on a mission to inspect and recover debris from the only triangle ship the humans have been able to shoot down. Both are women - Yann and Cassegrain's primary artistic liberty was to gender-swap the original protagonists, and to recast the human colonists as a matriarchy. The triangle ship crashed in the jungle, so this recasting means that Cassegrain draws both women in skimpy hot-weather outfits, with occasional scenes of full nudity. I might be wrong, but I kind of don't think Cassegrain would have drawn male protagonists looking sexy in distress, with their dicks out while shooting guns at drooling alien carnivores, in quite the same way he draws them when they're women.

 

Marcel is a blue-collar type, press-ganged into service straight from prison, and she has an earthy appreciation for roughing it in the jungle, and she swears continuously. Louis is persnickety and proper, and is only doing this so she can try to steal some local medicine for her sick daughter back on Earth. I think this book is supposed to be comedic, with about half the humor coming from the friction between Marcel and Louis, and half coming from toilet humor about the giant caterpillars' shit, farts, and other secretions, all of which are important to the roach people. Their alcohol is fermented from caterpillar shit; the medicine Louis needs is essentially pus. Marcel takes this all in stride and Louis is disgusted by all of it.

 

While these two are in the jungle, the triangle-ship aliens succeed in provoking a full-scale native rebellion against the humans, who rush to evacuate. Louis keeps hallucinating a dead roach-person king, and eventually becomes the king's reincarnation, and the roach's new post-rebellion leader.

 

I'm fairly sure Wul was writing a satire about the First Indochina War, the conflict that preceded what Americans call the Vietnam War, although the scenes of people crowding onto overloaded evacuation shuttles are drawn to look like scenes from the American military's withdrawal from Vietnam. I say satire, but I'm not sure I really understand Wul's point or target, or at least not as interpreted by Yann and Cassegrain.

 

The natives appear, by human standards, to be gullible and unintelligent. They have no empathy for others' suffering, and nearly everything they do seems to be a joke whose punchline is '...and Louis is grossed out by that!' That isn't actually an argument that they don't deserve political freedom, but they do seem like exaggerated versions of the colonial excuse that the people being colonized are childlike and uncivilized and need the education and firm discipline the colonizers will bring. And they are easily manipulated, first by the humans, then by the triangle aliens, and finally by Louis-as-king who brokers peace with the humans again.

 

The human matriarchy is portrayed as being almost completely amoral, with every official we see being crass, ruthless, and needlessly abusive toward her subordinates. And Marcel's personality most consists of her using racial slurs against the roach people, being joyously unfazed by alien grossness, and exclaiming a steady stream of gender-swapped profanity, complaining that a long caterpillar ride hurt her vag, for example, where a man would presumably complain about the pain in his ass.

 

So the overall effect seems to be less of a critique of colonialism, and more a scenario where everyone is awful, but where Louis merging with the soul of the king and ruling the natives is shown as justified and almost universally beneficial. The triangle aliens don't benefit, but their exploitation of the roach people is depicted as unambiguously wrong, while the humans' self-serving justifications for colonial occupation appear to be literally true within the text.

 

The Vietnam War inspired a lot of American scifi authors to try to grapple with the morality of what their country was doing. It seems like it should be easy for the interested reader to find another book that does it better.