Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

World Heist

 
 
World Heist

by Linnea Sterte

Peow 

2024

 

 

World Heist is a fantasy graphic novel about two thieves stealing a treasure from a long-ruined palace and then learning the history of their prize. It's quite short, and doesn't so much end as set up more to come, so that it feels like a single chapter plucked from a longer work.
 
I hope there will be more, because I can hardly describe how much I like artist Linnea Sterte's work. I'm enthralled by it. She works in flowing lines that look like they poured from a fountain pen, just black and a couple tones of grey. Her work reminds me some of Mobius and of Yoshitaka Amano because of how fluid it is, how pretty, how detailed and decorated, how strange.
 
The thieves go by the noms de guerre of Tiger and Task. We see them in action before we really understand what they're doing. Tiger has a cat's face and can turn into a cat, and he can see the past, useful when the palace you're robbing is so swallowed up by the desert it seems to belong in the Ozymandias poem. Task is a living spell, drawn onto the skin of a dead child, a ghost animating a corpse, and she seems to be able to open anything, which is useful when you're stealing, full stop.
 

  
What they steal is, as the title of the book suggests, a miniature world inside a magic egg. The world was a wedding present from a king to his young bride (or possibly to himself), or rather it's the dwelling place of the real present, a trapped god, a divine androgyne, who has remained alive inside the world in the egg across the vast expanse of time since. In the end, Tiger and Task free the god, who agrees to accompany them ... and you can see why I'd like to know what happens next. 
 
What's the next score? What's the bigger job they can complete now that there's a third thief in the crew? What do such fantastical beings even desire that the human world can offer them, and what trials and guardians would they have to overcome to get it? I hope we will get another chapter sometime, and I'll definitely be looking for more of Sterte's work now that she's drawn me in.

Destiny

 
 
Destiny

by Otto Nuckel

Farrar & Rinehart

1930 

 

 

Destiny is one of the wordless novels of the early 20th century, an early kind of graphic novel with a single illustration on each page that tells a narrative without words. Last year I read The Sun by Frans Masereel,which depicts a man repeatedly trying to touch the sun in the sky, I think as an allegory for artistic ambition. Masereel seems to have pioneered this style of sequential art, with Otto Nuckel, the artist who wrote Destiny inspired by Masereel, and Lynd Ward, the most famous American to work in this style, apparently inspired by both Masereel and Nuckel.
 

Destiny is a social-realist story about the hard life of a woman born into poverty, who is repeatedly mistreated by men and punished by the legal system. Nuckel used leadcuts instead of the woodcuts favored by Masereel and Ward - as a result, his images are much smaller and finely detailed, with lots of halftones produced by crosshatching. The result is a narrative that falls somewhere between William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress prints and something like Diary of a Lost Girl or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, somewhere between a morality play and a realistic account of a single life.
 
We follow our protagonist across 17 chapters, depicting her life from childhood to her violent death. In between, she'll just about every kind of harm that could befall a woman in her position. As a child, she is neglected by patents who are too tired and distracted to show her love. Her father, a drunk, is killed by a trolley. Her exhausted and overworked mother has a heart attack and drops her lantern, burning their room down, and half the rooming house with it. 
 
Our protagonist moves from the city to the countryside, where she becomes a servant on a farm. She's courted by a traveling salesman, and when she agrees to a picnic with him, he rapes her and then travels on his way. We see our protagonist continue working throughout her pregnancy. She gives birth by the river, maybe to a stillborn child, or maybe she immediately commits infantacide. Downriver, in the city, the police find the body, and in time she is arrested, but on trial, set to prison, and eventually released. 
 

The traveling salesman pursues the young woman as she works on the farm.

 
After she gets out of prison, a procurer spots her a brings her to a brothel. She lives and works there as a prostitute. After some time in that life, she strikes up a friendship, and maybe a mutual attraction, with the brothel's handyman. He helps her leave, and she moves in with him, enjoying an idyllic period as his girlfriend, both of them working, keeping house, visiting a summer fair and spending time in the park. But the brothel's procurer doesn't tolerate defections, apparently, and he murders the handyman, leaving our protagonist bereft again.
 
Depressed, she goes to the riverside and jumps in, but an older man sees her and calls for help, allowing her to be saved in time. He visits her during her convalescence, then proposes, and they get married. He's a tailor, and as his wife, she has a home and work helping with the sewing, though maybe less romance than with the handyman. Then into their lives comes a fabric salesman, who seems young and better-looking than the tailor... (I'm not sure if Nuckel had an unusually low opinion of salesmen, or if it was like, common at the time to be so anxious about their sexuality.) 
 
The fabric salesman befriends the tailor, socializes with the couple at home, and the three attend the circus together. Afterward, the protagonist and the salesman start a daytime love affair while the tailor is at work. One of the husband's friends spies on the lovers though, and the protagonist flees with the salesman.
 
Sadly, what she gets is not more romance, but more work. The salesman seems to laze about most of the day, forcing her to do all the housework and make an income working in a restaurant kitchen. In the evenings, he likes to go out drinking and gambling. One night, when the protagonist and salesman are out at a bar together, he picks a fight with another guy, who beats him badly, and seems like he might kill him. The protagonist protects her boyfriend by hitting the other guy with an axe, killing him. The police are called, and she goes on the run, holing up in a boarding house like the one she grew up in. The police break down the door to her room, and when she tries to flee out the window, they shoot her in the back, killing her.
 
To Nuckel's credit, all this is rendered in fine detail across over 200 leadcut prints. I think the story goes on a little long, it could've maybe used like one fewer section, both for the sake of narrative coherence, and to avoid the feeling of going overboard with hardship after hardship. Overall, it's an impressive piece of storytelling, and I can see why other artists were inspired to try out this style. 

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

Donald's Happiest Adventures

 
 
Donald's Happiest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas

translated by David Gerstein

Fantagraphics

2023 

 

 
Earlier this year, I read a comic by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas that pretended to be a reprinting of a rare (and incomplete) Mickey Mouse comic from the 1960s. It was a wild ride! They exploited the metafictional conceit to show only the high points of a globe-spanning adventure, without needing to worry about how to connect them. Any transitions or bookkeeping just became 'lost chapters' and 'missing pages'. That also made any dialogue briefer and more episodic.
 

Donald's Happiest Adventures also pretends to collect a 1960s comic, although this time, it's a complete sequential storyline. Donald is once again called in to search for lost treasure at Uncle Scrooge's behest, but this time he's looking for the secret of happiness. What follows is still a madcap trip around the world, with stops in an Eastern European dictatorship and a Himalayan monastery, but the story this time is a bit slower and more coherent, with fewer locales and more talking. The most important thing happening here is the sharing of ideas, as Donald (and us alongside him) hears many different perspectives on the philosophy and psychology of happiness.
 
Years ago, I attended an undergraduate philosophy presentation. Each of the students had picked a philosopher and studied up on their writings so that they could adopt their chosen thinker's persona, so you had some wearing bed sheet togas and others in thrift store suits. The theme of the event was something like how to be a good person, or how to live a good life, and what the students said was improvised instead of scripted. Anyway, the thing that stood out to me was that at first, they all seemed to try to out-compete each other to see who could prescribe the harshest asceticism, and then later, once they all agreed they could take it as given that of course being a good person meant forsaking all worldly pleasures, giving up rich foods and alcohol and music and dancing and sex, once they agreed on that, then they started to argue about what else you might add to this life of austerity and self-denial to make it truly good, things like education and charity and so forth. (And of course various forms of worship and devotion to one of the many interpretations of God.)
 
I feel like attending that talk actually got me to clarify some of my own thoughts, because instead of thinking of total self-abnegation as the starting point for any life worth leading, hearing that claim articulated over and over again clarified for me that what I believe in is hedonism. I don't really want a life of unlimited dissipation; I understand the argument that too much pleasure-seeking has diminishing returns, that it can come at the expense of worthier pursuits. But as a baseline, as a starting point? I say yes, give me hedonism! Give me pleasure; give me happiness! Yes, we should cultivate the higher virtues of education and art. Yes, we should seek to spend time with others, and help them when they're in need. But I agree with Maslow that we can only really focus on those higher goals once our basic needs are met and baser desires are fulfilled. People deserve to be happy, they deserve to be comfortable, deserve to feel good. It is those feelings, and not their denial, that should serve as the foundation of life.
 
Anyway, Donald Duck hears many different ideas, but Trondheim and Keramidas seemto favor the idea that it's harder to seek happiness than it is to avoid unhappiness, and that a big part of that, beyond having enough for basically comfortable living, is to avoid setting too-high expectations or making comparisons to others who have more. Both will tempt you to chase something you can't catch, and diminish your ability to enjoy what you already have. That's an idea that comes up not just in the philosophical discussion, but that we see played out by watching how other characters act.
 
Mickey's Wackiest Adventures is definitely the wilder of the two books, and possibly it's just all around better - more fun, more ideas, more experimentation, more adventure. But I did like Donald's Happiest Adventures, and I think there's some merit to its more thoughtful writing and slower pace. 

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

Thieves is one of my favorite comics so far this year, and it mostly came as a pleasant surprise, because I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, just that I'd heard that it was good. It's fair to say I caught only a fraction of the buzz. In addition to being praised in basically every publication that prints reviews, Thieves won Lucie Bryon the Entente Litteraire Prize, which was presented to her by the queen of England and the first lady of France. Which is pretty impressive for a comic about two queer girls in high school going to house parties, getting drunk, and stealing things!

 

Thieves isn't quite as scandalous as I make it sound, but Bryon is willing to allow her characters to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to handle their emotions and their social relationships badly. But most of the book isn't about doing the wrong thing, its about trying to put it right again afterward. Friends and girlfriends push one another to be better, to try harder.

 

Ella is a social butterfly and a bit of a tomboy; she has a crush from a distance on Madeline, a femme girl who sits in front of her in morning class. Ella's best friend Leslie sits beside her every day, and tells her to stop longing from afar and actually just go talk to her already! But before Ella quite gets the chance, she and Leslie crash a house party, and Madeline is there. Ella is nervous, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up at home to discover that she's stolen a half dozen curios from one of the party host's closets...

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

Ella got home safe the night before hanks to Leslie, and also thanks to Leslie, Madeline comes over that morning to check on her. It turns out that Madeline's been crushing on Ella from a distance too, and now that they both know, they start dating. Ella soon realizes that the person she stole from was Madeline, but there's a twist. All the curios were things Madeline had stolen too. Not because she was drunk; more like acting out at times when she felt overwhelmed by negative emotions.

 

Ella and Madeline agree that it will feel better to stop carrying physical reminders of mistakes around with them. They spend the rest of the book returning the stolen items one by one, sneaking them into house parties and leaving them where the owner will eventually find them. Returning the items means confronting the original negative feelings, which is hard. A few times, Ella and Madeline fight. Leslie helps with a few of the reverse-burglaries, and she helps the couple work things out after arguing. She is like, the straight analogue to the 'gay best friend' character of 90s rom-coms. Like all stories set in the senior year of high school, the story ends with graduation.

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

I like Bryon's characters and her storytelling, and the emotional realism of a shy kid acting out when she gets bullied or teased, in part because she has no one she can talk to. Once Madeline has a real friend and can put her feelings into words, she's able to control her actions better.

 

I also really, really like Bryon's art. Her figures are fairly realistic, but they're also quite expressive. They're like, just the right amount of stretchy and cartoony for the story she wants to tell. Her use of color is great, too. Each scene has a single accent color that reflects to mood and time of day, to complement the black ink drawings. School is orange, outdoors at night is green, parties are red. Some background and scenery details appear solely in color and negative space, with no black outline at all. The colors are soft, and rich, like muted jewel tones. On the few occasions Bryon uses more than one, the art suddenly takes on surprising depth.

Lost Letters

 
Lost Letters

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Magnetic Press

2024 

 

 

 I feel quite torn about Lost Letters, because I really liked almost the entire book ... and really didn't like way it ended. Lost Letters is a French graphic novel that feels like it was inspired by manga and anime, and while this comparison gets tossed around a lot lately, I think that creator Jim Bishop has created something that's so influenced by Studio Ghibli that you could pretty easily imagine them adapting it for the screen. The book is marketed as being for a YA audience, and that's probably generally fine, but the ending is so dark, so sad, and because it's the ending and nothing comes after it, so un-processed, that I wouldn't really feel comfortable handing it to a teen unless I really trusted them to seek out someone to talk to afterward if they needed it.
 

Lost Letters takes place on a picturesque island with a Mediterranean climate and a population that is predominantly talking fish-people, with only a few humans around. From the start, we're following Iode (short for Iodine), a boy of 11 or 12 who lives alone with his pet pelican, and who's waiting for a letter from his mother. Iode's mother is a pilot, she and her husband are no longer together, and Iode is convinced that she's looking for a new island for the two of them to go live on, and that when she finds it, she'll send him a letter telling him to come move back in with her. In fact, he's really, super convinced that she already sent this letter, and that the only reason he hasn't received it yet is because it's gotten lost in the mail.
 
So let me say that it's obvious from the outset that this is going to be a sad book. No matter how lighthearted its adventures might appear, the audience knows, we know, that whatever the situation with Iode's mother is, it's definitely not what he thinks it is, and it's definitely not that the letter he's hoping for is just stuck somewhere else in the island's mail system, simply waiting for him to find it. And we may suspect that, on some level, Iode knows this too, and he's in denial. So we know that parts of this book are going to be sad, especially when Iode learns and finally confronts the truth about his mom, but we may also hope that he'll maybe make a new friend or two, or maybe reconcile with his father, in a way that lets him reach a point of acceptance. And things sort of go like you'd expect, right up until they suddenly don't.
 

A sample of Jim Bishop's art.
From the left: Sista, the goldfish cop, and Iode.

 

 
Iode takes the family car and drives into town on another part of the island, so he can go to the post office. On the way, he meets Sista, an older teen girl who's hitchhiking to get to town. Sista is involved in a bunch of hijinks, and basically all the action and excitement in the book emerges from her plotline. Sista is a courier for the mob, headed into town to deliver a mysterious briefcase. The mob boss is an octopus. Sista is also an undercover agent for the royal guard, who's infiltrating the mob by working her way up through the ranks as an errand girl. The royal guard is Sista's found family, filling a void in her life since she was abandoned as a child. Her handler's codename is Mom.
 
Iode assumes Sista will help him at the post office, which already has an hours-long line when they reach town. She immediately sneaks off to continue her covert operation. Iode, apparently unable to conceive of any other reason she wouldn't hang out with him, jumps to the conclusion that she was kidnapped, and calls the police. 
 
An incompetent goldfish cop (he has a humanoid robot body, but his head is just a goldfish swimming in a glass bowl, wearing a police cap) briefly takes on the case, but he's much too busy chasing glory to bother with kid stuff. Unfortunately, he does mention all this to a corrupt fish cop, who immediately tells the mafia that their secret courier is attracting too much attention, and just like that, Sista is burned, both from the mob and from the royal guards. 
 
There's a lot of moving parts between cause and effect here - including that the mob wouldn't have wanted Sista to hitchhike, or take the cablecar across town, she was supposed to walk the whole way - but to be clear, Iode made a silly, childish assumption and then called the police about it, which is a roll of the dice every time, and that resulted in Sista getting fired. In fact, without some timely help from Iode at the aquarium, that phone call likely would've led to Sista being shot, or drowned. Neither Iode nor Sista seems to realize the connection, and it's unclear to me how much responsibility, if any, Bishop assigns to the phone call, but there it is.
  
Anyway, there's a shoot-out, an aquarium collapse, a last minute rescue. Iode and Sista do start to become friends, and the next day, she joins him at the post office, and rides with him when he borrows a seaplane to chase down a mail flight, which circuitously leads to a final confrontation with the mob. It's all very exciting, even fun. Bishop's art is excellent, just the right blend of realistic and cartoony. His poses are dynamic, his faces expressive. You practically feel like you're already watching animation when you read it.
 
When none of Iode's attempts to find the letter go anywhere, Sista goes with him to see his estranged father, who tells her the truth his son won't accept. Iode's mom left five years earlier, because she had terminal cancer and wanted to enjoy one last flight before she died. She wrote a letter to explain all this before she left, and Iode received the letter. Sista takes Iode back to the beach house, where she finds the letter, right next to the mailbox, where he read it then refused to accept it and blocked it out. Sista gets Iode to face the truth, and he instantly ages five years, suddenly appearing 16 or 17. It's a powerful visual metaphor of how he was stuck, and how he's now achieved catharsis. It's sad, but acceptance is better, right?
 
And then there's the epilogue. It's one year later. The incompetent goldfish cop is now a janitor, and actually good at it. Iode is becoming a young man. He looks awkward, but time is passing for him again. And what about Sista? We see her commit suicide by walking into the ocean and drowning. Then Iode receives her suicide note as a letter. She explains that she's never recovered from the loss of her found family in the royal guard, and sees no future for herself without that job. 
 
And that's that, that's the end. We explicitly see the other characters able to accept things and move on. But Sista does not, and the way Bishop chooses to present it sees especially cruel. Her death is presented as a thing that happens to Iode, as one last chapter in what remains fundamentally his story. And as I said earlier, there's no more context, no more explanation. It's shocking, and then it's over. Why did her friendship save him, but his friendship didn't save her? I know that can happen in life, but this is fiction. Bishop didn't have to write it this way; he chose to. And his decision really soured me on a book that I otherwise really enjoyed up to that point, and made it hard for me to recommend despite how much there is to like in it.

The Yellow 'M'

 
The Yellow 'M'

Blake and Mortimer 6

by Edgar Jacobs

translated by Clarence Holland

Cinebook

1956, reprinted 2007

 

 

The Yellow 'M' is an early Franco-Belgian comic about a mysterious villain's crime spree in London. At first, the criminal just seems exceptionally competent, but he evades capture in ways that are truly superhuman, which suggests the involvement of a mad scientist in the whole scheme... The Yellow 'M' is the sixth book in Edgar Jacobs's collected Blake and Mortimer comics, although I gather it might be the most popular, and it was the first one of the series reprinted in English.
 
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
 
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
 
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
 
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
 
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
 
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
 
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.

The Sun

 
The Sun

by Frans Masereel

The Frans Masereel Group

1919, reprinted 2020
 

 

The Sun is a wordless graphic novel, part of a tradition from the early 20th century of books made up entirely of woodblock prints. Lynd Ward is probably the most famous artist in this tradition, but instead, I'm starting with one of the works of Frans Maesreel. Unlike later sequential art, there are no panels here. Each page is a single black-and-white image, although they do clearly tell a linear story.
 

The Sun is framed as being a dream. It begins with a man asleep at his desk, then his avatar appears, goes on an adventure and returns, and then the man wakes up. The avatar looks maybe like a younger, fitter version of the man. His adventure shows him looking at, and repeatedly trying to reach out and grab, the sun. I understand Masereel to mean this metaphorically, rather than literally. The sun, I think, represents some kind of idea or ideal that the man wants to achieve, something that guides him, obsesses him, but also remains ever out of reach. Beyond just the setting, in Europe immediately after WWI, the spirit of The Sun reminds me of the film Metropolis, with its hope that if you could just find the right idea, that idea would solve class conflict.
 
The man climbs to the top of buildings several times, each one higher than before. He climbs a tree, he catches a flock of birds to carry him, he rides in an airplane, he is held aloft by a kite, he jumps really high. The sun is omnipresent in the sky. Each time, he loses his grip or footing while reaching out for the sun, or his support fails, or he gets too close and catches fire. The sun is on almost every page, except in some of the city scenes. The man points out the sun to others. Some try to join him, some seem to laugh, some offer him distraction or try to defeat him, but he's indefatigable. No matter how many times he falls, or how far, he continues. He looks behind library books, he looks behind the crucifix in a church, he looks at the lamplight on the wall of a brothel, but he's not fooled for long by other kinds of light. Eventually he leaves the city and continues his search out in nature. When the dream ends and he wakes up, he laughs at himself, but I don't think he's really given up.
 
Masereel's prints are dominated by black, with white providing the outlines and highlights. The black is really the negative space here, with white creating all the details. You really get a sense of being immersed in a city - the buildings, the monuments, the transportation, the crowds of onlookers. For all that the prints are iconic and simplified, you get a surprisingly detailed look at early 20th century life! 

 

Mickey's Craziest Adventures

 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures

by Lewis Trondheim

art by Nicolas Keramidas 

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Fantagraphics

2016, reprinted 2024

 

 

For whatever reason, a lot of early science fiction stories are framed as though the actual author of the piece is a mere intermediary, simply delivering to the audience a work composed by someone else. They'll have an introduction where the author claims to have found the whole manuscript stuffed in a glass bottle on the beach, or else the first chapter will be a mundane account of their golfing weekend where, oh by the way, they happened upon a mysterious diary in the bedside table in their guest house, and then the rest of the book is the fantastical contents of the found document.
 
Mickey's Craziest Adventures is like that - the intro claims that author Trondheim and artist Keramidas were out garage sale shopping one Saturday, when they discovered an incomplete run of a rare Mickey Mouse comic, a collector's dream!, one that Disney has never reprinted, and that you, the casual fan, may never even have heard of. This is the metafictional setup, like in those early scifi stories, the conceit that what you're reading is actually more authentic than it appears, that it has an older and more compelling provenance. I should note, I absolutely love that sort of thing, even as I admit I don't fully understand all the reasons for it.
 
Anyway, supposedly, this rare comic, 'Mickey's Quest,' has a standalone story in each issue, plus a serialized tale that covers its entire run, that only gets one page per issue and is always 'to be continued...' So that ongoing tale is 'Mickey's Craziest Adventures,' and this book supposedly collects as much of it as Trondheim and Kermidas could find, chapters 2 through 82, with about half missing.
 
Keramidas's commitment to the bit is impressive. In addition to using faux faded colors to imitate the look of an old comic (like Ed Piskor and Tom Scioli used in their X-Men and Fantastic Four Grand Designs), several pages are also faux distressed, with the appearance of fake foxing, mildew, coffee stains, and in one case, a torn bottom corner.
 
Something like every other chapter is 'missing,' though you sometimes get a larger gap, or a few directly sequential pages in a row. The effect is a comic that's all set-pieces and action sequences, with a bare minimum of connective tissue. Each page is a spectacle; working out the plot requires paying attention to the details. In actuality, media companies in the 1960s expected that their readers (and viewers) might not catch every issue (or episode), so Trondheim's careful use of dialogue to let us know what we've missed without bogging down the forward momentum is period-appropriate, not just a way to write a comic that's all killer, no filler. Even into the 1980s and 90s, this is a pretty accurate representation of how I experienced any sort of ongoing series I liked. (The only thing missing is repeats and chapters out of order!)
 
I gave a copy of this book to my brother-in-law a few years ago, because he's a fan of the classic Disney comics this one is mimicking, like Carl Barks's Uncle Scrooge comics that the show Duck Tales is based on. He said that this really is Mickey's craziest adventure, but for Donald, it's just top half. Despite the title, this really is Donald's comic too. Mickey's nemesis Pete and Donald's enemies the Beagle Boys have teamed up to steal Uncle Scrooge's gold, so Mickey and Donald team up too to get it back.
 
What follows is a madcap chase around the world, involving a stolen shrink ray, a jungle, a desert, a meteor crashing into the earth, an underground lost world of dinosaurs and mammoths, detours to the Himalayas and the moon, a half dozen secret lost cities full of treasure, a visit to Atlantis, and finally finally a climactic confrontation where a frustrated Mickey beats the tar out of everyone to retrieve the stolen fortune.
 
It's a wild ride, and I had fun racing to keep up with it. Beyond paying homage to the comics of old, the metafictional conceit provides a good excuse to present a story that moves at a much faster clip than modern audiences are used to, and that forgoes as much exposition as possible - transitional text that's expected, but apparently ultimately unnecessary - to craft a story unapologetically that leaps from high point to high point, sprinting across its entire length with scarcely a pause for breath.

A Steampunk Carol

 
 
A Steampunk Carol

by Luca Frigerio

art by Lorenzo Pigliamosche

Last Ember Press

2023

 

 

A Steampunk Carol is a fantasy comic based somewhat on The Nutcracker. Despite the title, there's only one thing that seems at all steampunk about it, which is the costuming of the leader of the toy soldiers, who replaces the Nutcracker, and who has a few brass robotic or cybernetic looking details. I didn't particularly like it. The ending is either weirdly incomplete, or else it signals that Last Ember Press intends this to be the first volume of an ongoing series, so that loose ends here will be resolved later.
 
I love The Nutcracker as a ballet, though I've never read ETA Hoffman's original short story. I have read Natalie Andrewson's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which I gather is a pretty faithful adaptation. And a couple years ago, I read a history of The Nutcracker ballet in America, and its contemporary role as like, the one ballet that everyone who dances has been in, that every audience member has seen.
 
You wouldn't think it'd be too hard to use The Nutcracker as the basis for a fantasy story! You've got toy soldiers come to life, wearing fancy red uniforms, fighting mice armed with sabres and cannons. You've got fairies from all over holding court, sleigh rides, great feasts, dancing food. You've got a teenage girl at her coming-of-age moment, right at the cusp of childhood innocence and an awakening interest in the larger world, allowing you to play up whichever side of that suits your story better. You've got ambiguity, if you want it, about whether this is a real trip to fairyland or just a dream.
 
And yet I've been disappointed by both A Steampunk Carol nor the film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. I think part of it is that both insist that the girl at the center of things is mourning her dead mother, and when she arrives in fairyland, she discovers that her mother went there before her, that everyone knows her, that her mom was a beloved hero who had countless adventures there previously, and that she, the protagonist of the story, seems inadequate by comparison.
 
It's mystifying to me that both these recent adaptations have settled on this same basic plot, because the girl's mother is still alive in Hoffman's original, and also because, while I think The Nutcracker is a bit flexible in terms of the kind of fantasy story you could use it to tell, it seems like a spectacularly bad vehicle for talking about grief and mourning. And just generally, I don't understand why both adaptations looked at the hero of a story and decided that what she really needed was a case of Imposter Syndrome and to be overshadowed by a parental legacy she can never live up to.
 

A Steampunk Carol only tells the first half of this story. The girl, her dad, and infant brother are visited by some of the dad's old sailor friends, who give her the toy soldiers that start the thing off. The war between the toys and the mice is explicitly because the mom died - she was a magical healer, you see, but because she died, she couldn't heal the Rat King's sick son. The whole comic is taken up with warfare, culminating in a duel between the Rat King and the Nutcracker, and all the girl can really do is apologize for not being her mom, which the sick Rat Prince accepts, and convinces his dad to stop warring. There is no after-the-war story, no fairies, no food, no dancing. The girl then returns to reality to learn that her dad's friends have taken her little brother to raise for him, since he, as a single father, can apparently only manage one child.
 
I'd love to see a fantasy story based on The Nutcracker that leans into the beautiful visuals, and that also lets the girl at the center be the hero of her own story, and to accomplish something more than convincing herself that her dead mother wouldn't be disappointed in her! Sadly, this isn't that story.

The Phantom Scientist

 
 
The Phantom Scientist

by Robert Cousin

translated by Edward Gauvin

MIT Press

2023

 

 

The Phantom Scientist is a French graphic novel set at a mysterious, isolated institute, where scientists from a variety of fields are invited to advance their research. The institute itself is a kind of experimental project. The idea is that incidental interactions with peers from other fields will produce novel, serendipitous discoveries ... but it also produces a rising tide of chaos that will eventually force the institute's current director (a sociologist!) to call in the army to evacuate everyone for their own safety. This is the fourth iteration of the institute, and when it inevitably collapses, it'll be restarted with new researchers and a new director.
 
Our viewpoint character is professor Stephane Douasy, a physicist who studies fractals and spirals, who is interested in applying those ideas to understand plant growth. Based on the acknowledgments, it seems he's closely based on a real person, Stephane Douady, so I suspect that the discovery he eventually makes about leaf shapes is a real finding from the actual Dr Douady's research. The fictional Stephane is the last of the 24 scientists to arrive at the institute. A new one comes at regular intervals to dampen the chaos. Now that Stephane has arrived, the institute should function at maximum capacity for the final 6 months of its 7-year cycle before collapsing. But there's a problem - there's already way too much chaos, and it doesn't seem to calm, so the institute may not survive its full span...
 
Stephane is an outgoing fellow, and he quickly befriends two other scientists in his building - Louise, a linguist who was working on teaching computers speech but has given up since the appearance of chat-bots, and Villhelm, who's written a computer program that accurately predicts his own future actions, but that works so slowly that they always arrive late. (Ominously, each set of predictions includes his percent chance of death.) Their building also has the office of the never-seen Dr Paniany, the 'phantom scientist' of the title.
 
Stephane is basically doing what the institute is supposed to - he gets his introverted colleagues to leave their labs and talk to each other for the first time in forever, he insists on checking inside Paniany's office (the other two had been assuming he'd either never or arrived or left before they got there), and gaining new insights from seeing his research. Vilhelm figures out how to make his program run faster, and Louise gets reinvigorated out of her torpor, and decides to find where inside the institute Paniany is camped out.
 
Dr Paniany was researching the P vs NP problem. In math and computing, some problems just don't have a single right answer. Among those that do, there are problems that are 'easy to solve' called P, and problems that are hard to solve but 'easy to check' called NP. Easy to solve here means you have a set of instructions, an algorithm, you can follow that lets you find a solution without needing to guess or use trial-and-error. Easy to check means you can tell that a right answer is right. The NP example author Robin Cousin gives is a jigsaw puzzle - hard to solve, but very easy to tell if it's put together correctly or not. (Complex as they look, Rubik's cubes are P. If you know the steps, you can solve one, from any starting arrangement, in seconds.) There's a longstanding debate about whether or not P = NP, if every problem we can easily check has some algorithm that would let us solve it easily too, even if we haven't found it yet, or if there are some problems that can only be solved by trial-and-error.
 
In reality, we don't have an answer either way. In the comic, Paniany has proved that P = NP, and written an algorithm using his proof that helps every other researcher who encounters it do their own research much better and faster. He, and his proof, are the source of the rising chaos that overtakes the institute during the second half of the comic.
 
Cousin's art style reminds me a bit of Jason Shiga. His figures are cartoony, with relatively little detail, fairly thick outlines, and bright colors.
 
It's pretty rare to see a sociologist show up in contemporary scifi! The other example I can think of is Connie Willis's Bellwether, which was also about how the 'chaos' of interactions between people who might not otherwise meet can produce unexpected creativity or start trends and fads. This is, in fact, a real sociological finding, although both Cousin and Willis play it up for effect, in the same way scifi authors have been doing with ideas from physics forever. But one of the earliest findings in the sociology of networks is about how you can get more new information from acquaintances rather than close friends and family, a phenomenon called 'the strength of weak ties.' That name comes from Mark Granovetter, although if you've heard the idea before, it's probably because of Malcolm Gladwell, who's done the most to popularize it. It's too bad the seismograph-style Organizational Chaos Index the institute director keeps consulting isn't a real measure; it'd be awfully useful!

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

 
 

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

by David B

translated by Kim Thompson

Fantagraphics

2006, reprinted 2011

  

 

There's a rare pleasure in wandering stacks of bookshelves, picking out a volume because it somehow catches your eye, discovering that you've never heard of this title or author before, flipping through, and feeling that spark of interest and curiosity that makes you want to take it home. Librarians call this 'serendipitous discovery,' and in this age that overflows with reviews, recommendations, suggestions, referrals, coming soons, see alsos, and curated lists, it's not how I, or most people, find most of the books they read, but it's how I found David B's The Armed Garden, and Other Stories, in a used bookstore in Portland, tucked between trade paperbacks of Aquaman and The Avengers.

Rare too is the pleasure of reading a book you found this way, discovering something unlike what you usually read, maybe unlike anything you've ever read before, discovering something of quality, something you really enjoy, and that you found by happenstance, that you wouldn't have found any other way. That sort of thing doesn't happen every day. You want to savor it when it does. The Armed Garden is something special, and I'm glad I picked it out.

This is a graphic novel, a collection of three short stories, fantasy stories set amid the historic past. All three are medieval. Not in the sense of high fantasy, with princesses and knights. There are rulers, yes, and soldiers, but also fervent religious faith, competing heresies, and deeply weird magic that operates on a kind of fairy tale logic, outside of human control. These stories resemble tales from the Bible, or folk tales, stories that people might've shared alongside gossip of a neighbor's house-sized vegetables, or the miraculous birth of rabbits to a virgin one village over.

In the first story, 'The Veiled Prophet,' the wind blows a piece of cloth onto the face of a fabric merchant. It gets stuck there, allowing him to assume the forms of Jesus, Adam, Moses, but anyone who sees his true face dies. He amasses an army of followers, and the attention of the caliph, who sends his own army.

In the title story, 'The Armed Garden,' a crusader receives a vision that compels him to strip naked and find a new Eden. Many people join him, in his nudity, and his earthly paradise, including wild animals, and even walking trees, all carrying swords. Other crusaders come to destroy the garden, though its leader has become a star.

In the last story, 'The Drum That Fell in Love,' a mercenary captain is killed in battle, and his company has him, skinned, tanned to leather, and stretched to become a drum skin. When the drum is played, he returns as a ghost. The mercenaries carry the drum into battle, but eventually they're defeated, and the drummer, who's fallen in love with the ghost, runs off with the drum. The girl and the drum have more adventures together, including finding the physical location of heaven.

Each story has a weird, dream-like quality to it. There's none of the systematic, almost science-like logic that many contemporary fantasy stories apply to their magic. This is like something older, something pre-modern. David B's art is mostly black and white, with a bit of sepia shading. There's a very good match between the feel of the art and the tone of the stories.

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.

The Alliance of the Curious

 
The Alliance of the Curious
by Philippe Riche
Humanoids
2012

 

 

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.

Dead Memory

 
Dead Memory
by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
translated by Helge Dascher

Dark Horse Comics

2004

 

 

I really liked Marc-Antoine Mathieu's The Museum Vaults, a comic about an explorer mapping a giant, endless Louvre, when I read it a few years ago. Unfortunately, I found Dead Memory, which I just finished, unsatisfying.

 
Dead Memory is a relatively short graphic novel set in an infinite city that's beset by crisis. It's told in voiceover flashback as an ineffectual bureaucrat listens to a recording that narrates his failed efforts.
The city is densely built and mostly laid out like a grid. One night, a brick wall appears and blocks a road. It goes straight from the edge of a building on one side of the street across to the other, so no one can go around without going around the buildings, and it's too tall to easily climb.

 
More walls appear, then lots more. The city government wants to study the problem, but not do anything so rash as to act on it. They assign the bureaucrat to take measurements of the new walls that are quickly strangling everyday life. We keep seeing overhead maps with more and more diagonal walls chaotically carving up the grid of the city.

 
Also, everyone is losing their memories and forgetting how to talk. Somehow the two problems are related?
 

The most interesting scene, I thought, was when the bureaucrat went to the observatory to look through a telescope at a further-away part of the city to understand the extent of the problem. But in looking out over space, he's also looking back in time. All he can say for sure is that there weren't any walls over there at that point in the past. I thought this was a fun reimagining of how astronomy works.

 
Anyway, eventually the bureaucrat goes to the central computer, who like, sort of runs things, and sort of acts as advisor to the human government. It turns out, the computer did it! The computer also made the recording the guy will start listening to in the next scene. The computer resented being the responsible for remembering everything and making all our decisions, so it somehow engineered both the walls and the progressive amnesia. 

 
This is maybe a metaphor for the internet, I guess? Or the way writing and then printing supplanted the oral tradition and ended the ability of any one person to hold all their culture's knowledge inside their head? I don't really know what point Mathieu was trying to make here.

 
Anyway, then the bureaucrat turns off the computer, the walls fall down, people get their memory's back, the guy starts listening to the recording, and everyone starts using the bricks to build new walls that intersect the city grid in the form of concentric circles. What this is supposed to metaphorically illustrate, I have no idea. The end. 

 
Don't bother with this one, go read The Museum Vaults instead.

Black Water Lilies

 
Black Water Lilies
by Frederick Duval
art by Didier Cassegrain
translated by Edward Gauvin

adapted from the novel by Michel Bussi
Magnetic Press
2011, adapted 2022

 

 

Black Water Lilies is a graphic novel retelling of a 2011 novel by the same name. Bussi wrote the original, Duval adapted the text, Cassegrain supplied the beautiful watercolor imagery that makes the whole book look like a Monet painting come to life.

 
Black Water Lilies is also a murder mystery that takes place in Giverny, the village where Monet settled, built his gardens, and did a lot of his most famous paintings. The story focuses on an 11 year-old girl, the beautiful village school teacher who instructs the 11 year-olds, and an old woman in black, who narrates the story. A man has been killed inside the famous gardens, and police from Paris are called in to investigate. The woman in black begins the story by locating it very precisely in time, during an annual Monet festival in 2010, when the gardens are open to the public. She tells us from the start that the story begins with one murder and will end with another.

 
The old woman mostly wanders the village and observes. She is newly widowed, and secretly owns the 'Black Water Lilies,' the apocryphal last painting Monet made, all in black, just before he died. I spent nearly the entire book wondering if she was the murderer, and if so, why?

 
The little girl, Fannette, has a talent for painting and hopes to win an annual worldwide children's art contest, so she can go study abroad. Several of her classmates have crushes on her - one she loves back, another grows increasingly jealous. She also has a secret tutor, an old man who helps her improve her technique, until he is murdered too, and his body vanishes, with Fannette seemingly the only one who knows.

 
The teacher, Stephanie, has a jealous husband who is suspected of the murder. One of the Paris police officers is obviously smitten with her, which compromises the investigation. But Stephanie loves him back, and wants to leave her husband for him.

 
The dead man was known to have several affairs, and someone sends the police photos of him with other women, including Stephanie. Some of the photos are explicit, others seem benign except for the context. He had a note on his body that seems to imply he secretly had an 11-year old child with one of his mistresses. So who is the child, and who is the mother? Is this why he was killed? The dead man also dreamed of owning an original Monet, something he could never afford at a fair price, so could that be the reason instead?

 
For two weeks, the police bumble around without fully solving anything. In the end, the old woman explains who committed the murders, and in doing so, reveals several truths that lingered just out of focus at the periphery of the story the entire time. 

 
The whole book was excitingly tense, both because you knew another death was coming, and even moreso because you cared what would happen to the girl, the teacher, and the crone. The ending is incredibly well-executed and makes the entire book better in retrospect. I immediately began flipping back through to consider things anew. I highly recommend this one! It was an excellent choice for the last book I'll finish this year.