Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears by Sfar, Trondheim, and Boulet

Zenith is the one that will run forever, or as close to forever as human life allows. The Dungeon series started with Zenith, with Marvin and Herbert and the Dungeon itself at its height, and I expect as long as there are any Dungeon books, there will be Zenith titles. (Twilight ended once, though it seems to have restarted. Early Years could easily end. The sidebars - Parade, Monstres, Antipodes - are all separate books to begin with, and so begin and end in the same book.)

Dungeon, as a world and an overall series, took a long hiatus in the last decade or so, after the initial burst around the turn of the century: there was one book in 2009, two simultaneously in 2014, and then nothing until 2020. But it has roared back since then: according to the list of publications in French, there were five volumes in 2020, four in 2021, five more last year, two already in 2023 with one more coming out this month, and nine more announced for the next two years. I'm not the only one watching NBM, the US publisher of Dungeon, hoping they can keep up, and I've been happy to see a new Early Years omnibus this past spring and the previous Zenith omnibus last year.

Perhaps I should back up, for the new readers. Dungeon, as I've hinted, is a big epic fantasy series, set in a world populated by monsters and anthropomorphic people and odder things, in several sub-series set in different time periods, written by the French creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim and drawn by...well, just about everyone in French comics, by this point. [1] Their influences are probably more from fantasy gaming - mostly TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, where anything can happen and probably will - than from epic fantasy books, but there's a lot of ideas in the stew. 

The series is published by Delcourt in France, and here by NBM in omnibus editions, tending to be 2-in-1s at first publication and then reorganized into 4-in-1s later in their lives, with translations that I think have all been by Joe Johnson. As of right this moment (assuming the new book, Changement de programme, is out in Europe), there have been fifty-three books:

• Zenith, the first sub-series, is about a fantasy Dungeon at the height of its fame and power; there are ten books so far (all now available in English).
• Early Years, about the young man who will later become Keeper of that Dungeon, with six books so far (all available in English).
• Twilight, in which Dungeon, and the world it's on, suffer a major epic-fantasy apocalypse, partially caused by the now-Dark-Lord-ish Herbert, in nine books so far with one announced for next year (the first eight are available in English; I wouldn't be surprised if NBM is looking to do another volume late next year).
• Parade is a deliberately sillier sub-series, with adventures of Marvin and Herbert set early in Zenith; there have been six so far, with six more announced for 2024-25; only the first four have been published in English.
• Monstres was the original "sidebar stories" catch-all, which I thought could be set anywhere in the timeline - the official description calls it "great adventures of secondary characters." There have been seventeen so far, with one more coming out next year; twelve of them  - the whole classic era, but none of the new batch - are available in English.
• And with the resurgence of Dungeon, two new subseries were announced: Antipodes- and Antipodes+, which tell stories set far in the past and future, respectively; there have been two minus books, two plus books before this month, the new one in October, and one more plus for next year; none of these have been translated yet.

During the hiatus, in 2018, I had a series here on the blog running through the (then-existent) series, in something like a coherent order, under the overall title Dungeon Fortnight. I've kept that tag for the new books for simplicity.

That's a lot of links, a lot of backstory, a lot of books. But this is epic fantasy: there's always wads of backstory - call it lore or legends or geas or destiny - even at the very beginning of an adventure. And you can always just dive in anywhere; none of this is forbidding or gate-keeping.

So Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears collects the most recent two books about the height of Dungeon, Larmes et brouillard (Nov '22) and Formule incantatoire (Apr '23), both drawn by Boulet in an intricate style filled with crosshatching that sometimes looks too detailed for this world to me.

The first of those books is mostly unrelated to the overall get-back-the-Dungeon plot that's been running for three or four books now; series hero Herbert (a duck) and his wife Isis (a Kochak, and also a cat, which I think means the same thing here) are expecting their first child any minute now. Herbert learns, to his great surprise, that the Kochaks, who they are living with, have some unusual birth customs. Namely, "baptism" means dropping the newborn into a pit with a bunch of wolves, to win or die.

Herbert does not think a half-duck will do terribly well in this ordeal, and so first tries to argue against it and then steals away his newborn son to stymie the plans. This, of course, means that a tribe of ferocious, and angry, nomadic warriors are chasing him, led by his now-very-pissed wife. And there are other complications as well, as of course there must be.

(I don't want to get into more of the plot than that, but it ends happier than you'd expect for Dungeon.)

The second book gets back to that main plot, with Marvin - who also has just had a baby with his magician wife, and who also has complicated and weird rituals about that baby to follow as part of his own culture - is pulled into stopping a minor magical apocalypse unleashed by Delacort, the usurper of the Dungeon, during a mostly-successful assault by Our Heroes. There's a lot of running around, a lot of Marvin's blunt style not meshing well with the detailed plans and work of a bunch of magicians, and a big bang at the end. But it does, mostly, resolve that long-running plot...in a way that I'm sure sets hooks for the next two or three books.

As always, Dungeon is full of humor - mostly dark, always dry, usually quick in ways an unsuspecting reader could miss, but very funny a lot of the time in a lot of ways. It's a world full of extremes, with death lurking around every corner: an epic fantasy world, where everything is keyed up as high as possible almost all of the time. This is yet another wonderful romp in that world, and looking at the list of unpublished-in-the-US books just makes me want three or four more books like this right now.

[1] I think the original idea, between Sfar and Trondheim, was "you draw this one and I'll draw that one and we'll get our friends to do the others!" Sfar drew the first three Twilight books and Trondheim the first four Zenith, but they handed even those sub-series off to others afterward.