(This might be a quirk of mine, but I always want to find that creators I know - not even that I like, just anyone whose work I'm even aware of - continued their careers and did interesting or great or exciting things. I worked in publishing for more than a decade, and saw how many creative careers fizzle out after a couple of projects or a short decade. I hate that; I hate living in a world where that's the norm. So I'm always hoping for the opposite, for everyone.)
Be that as it may, this is the back half of the story. The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis continues and completes the story started in the first book, Sapiens, still focusing on the three main characters from Bad Break. Their roles shifted a bit from Bad Break to Alliance - Ernst-Lazare no longer seems to be immortal, or quite as unknowable; Rebecca X is not mentioned as working in porn; and Simon, well, Simon, in this book, seems to have become much dumber and less focused.
We do get a bit more explanation of the backstory, though that mostly fills out the outlines of what we knew or guessed from the first book. The three heroes have that jeweled Neanderthal skull, and are still looking for an old man, a possibly mentally-ill tramp named Griffon De Martel.
Griffon is both the heir apparent to the (vacant, of course) throne of France, from the medieval Carolingian dynasty, and the last living Neanderthal, the final product of a millennia-long secret society living among modern humans and interbreeding - presumably, exclusively among themselves.
Because of the first aspect of his lineage, he will disinherit Louis, the dissolute Bourbon pretender, due to some complicated hugger-mugger involving something called the Order of Saint Louis. And, because of that, three young blonde women called the Cocaine Sisters - Louis's lovers or friends or enablers or all three - are on a rampage to find and kill Griffon, with high-powered automatic weapons.
Because of the second aspect, as we eventually learn near the end of this book, Griffon is trying to get back to the secret crypt of his people - which is, of course, beneath Paris - where he will reunite that jeweled skull with its body. They both belong to the legendary first leader of his people, forty thousand or so years ago, who made them go underground in human society when the mammoths got hunted to extinction. (I swear I am not making any of this up.) And, legendarily, if the skull is placed on its body by the last Neanderthal, all of the dead Neanderthals will rise and take back the world that is rightfully theirs.
Simon and Rebecca and Ernst-Lazare are mostly bystanders or witnesses to this plot; they're trying to figure out if the skull is valuable, and, if so, to whom. They get shot at by the three women, try to find Griffon to talk to him about this whole bizarre situation, and come out of it all basically the same way they did in Bad Break. They do manage to keep their clothes on this time, which I suppose is an improvement.
It is all very Dan Brown, in that are-you-willing-to-believe-this? style. Riche has nice atmospheric storytelling art here; his people are angular, like a world full of high-fashion models, and his colors are moody. He has a lot of dialogue, to explain this oddball story, and it it all basically makes sense and is believable in the reading, which is all one can expect for a conspiracy-theory book like this one.
I don't think we got, or probably will get, any more comics from Riche, since he's spent the last twenty years in the animation mines. But who knows? Doing animation means he's probably still drawing regularly, so maybe he'll come back - with another tale of these three or something else. I'd like to think so. These books are just weird and specific enough that I feel like the world should have more of them.
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