The French editions took a decade to be published, from 2011 to 2020, during a period when Trondheim's Dungeon (see my series of posts for more) co-writer, Joann Sfar, was unavailable to continue Dungeon both due to his work in televised media and because he had his own solo epic fantasy, L'Ancien Temps [1].
See my post on Black, linked above; I don't expect I will get into the plot of The Land of Blue Demons in any depth, since that would spoil the first two to six books in the series.
In case you don't want to hit the link, here's the quick recap: Ralph is a duck in a world of anthropomorphic people (like Herbert in Dungeon), a smart-ass (like Herbert and most Trondheim protagonists), and potentially the Chosen One of his world (though the idea of a Chosen One was probably invented by a powerful wizard for his own purposes). He lives in a medieval kingdom ruled by King Malek, whom he and a group of other "blueys" (people with magical power have their hair and some other body parts turn blue) are trying to overthrow, for good and sufficient reasons.
As Blue Demons starts, Ralph is leaving his aged father, who is working on one plan to overthrow Malek, and planning to travel to the other side of the world to find Vom Syrus, Malek's great enemy, in an attempt to join forces.
During the course of the three albums collected here, Ralph travels across his home kingdom and all the way out to the island land where Vom Syrus rules, making new allies and enemies, intermittently disguised to hide his bluey nature, and learns a lot of things about Vom Syrus, Malek, and the sixteen major magical items of this world.
Trondheim-style fantasy is somewhat mechanistic: as a creator, he seems to love rules that construct his characters' options and make them figure out convoluted plans to take the greatest advantage of their powers. So several of those sixteen items can only be used once a day, Ralph's own powers (and maybe those of all the other blueys? it's not clear) are suppressed by drinking, and the sixteen items can interact in complicated ways if the same person owns or uses more than one of them at a time.
This time out, there's a bracelet that sends its wearer, bodily, off in the direction he points, and a sword that extends to cut and kill more things than you would expect. There are also some other items that are a surprise; I won't mention them.
As always, Trondheim's stories delight in complication, especially his longer pieces. His stories have a joy in destruction and battles, with characters always ending up running across roofs (or falling down onto them), hurling magical stuff at each other while things blow up in the background. He also is fond of prophecies, which of course never quite mean what they seem to mean, and especially prophecies given in real time by characters in the story.
There are a lot of surprises, battles, magic, and danger here. Characters you probably like will die quickly, sometimes off-panel. Characters you want to see die will be frustratingly resilient. This is a great Trondheim fantasy romp, with a lot of similarities to Dungeon but different enough (not as much obvious humor, for one) to give a sense of what Sfar brought to that project.
I'd recommend it, because Trondheim is a master and because it's a lot of fun. And also, cynically, because I want to see the back half of the series published. This one came out in October, and, as I type these words on Christmas Eve, Vol. 3 is scheduled for May and Vol. 4 for March, which my publishing brain says means that schedules are in the process of being adjusted and have not finalized yet, which implies sales of this book could be material to that scheduling. So go buy Ralph Azham.
[1] Which, if I can trust Goodreads, is only two bande dessinees and one novel long. Trondheim, even when he says he's trying to slow down, is (as usual) ferociously productive, and knocks off a twelve-book series while waiting around to re-start his other series which already had a couple of dozen books.
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