The Court Charade by Flore Vesco and Kerascöet

Let me tell you about the dangers of good intentions. Over the last few years, I've made an effort to include diacritical marks in people's names on this blog - because that's the right way to spell their names, obviously. It's slightly annoying and often involves a bunch of cut-and-pasting, but doing things right is its own reward.

It does mean, though, that the standard Blogger search function no longer works for those names: Kerascoet is not Kerascöet, so a search for one does not bring up the other. (Not to mention the trouble in getting special characters into the search box to begin with.)

I'm still going to spell names correctly, going forward. But it does mean that as I look back to figure out what I've written about a creator before - and you the home viewer might do the same - that I can easily miss things.

That's the lesson, of course. When writing about people from other cultures, the small details can make you miss things.

The Court Charade, though it inspired those thoughts, is not weighty or particularly serious. It's a romantic, adventurous story about a young woman in a world that might be historical or lightly fantasy - the usual story-book "once upon a time" kingdom. It was written by Flore Vesco, whose work I'm otherwise unfamiliar with, and drawn by the wife-and-husband team Kerascöet, here working in soft colors and often small panels, all unbordered but sitting cleanly in grids on their lovely pages. It's less visually pyrotechnic than previous Kerascöet books like Satania or even the similarly fairy-tale Beauty; this is a deliberately smaller, lighter, more personal story.

Our heroine is Countess Seraphine Marie-Geneviéve Alexandrina de Notre-Dame Chancies du Jousselinier Senestre lez Castiche de l'Auberivière sié l'Ostel de la Colline. But call her Serine. She's the oldest child of an elderly and kindly but impoverished nobleman and his imposing wife, spending her time taking care of five rambunctious (much) younger brothers. She loves stories and has the usual fairy-tale heroine characteristics: smart, determined, positive, beautiful without noticing it, essentially happy, resilient, egalitarian, and possessed of massive spirit and a core determination to do right and help people.

So of course she is thrown into a situation that is the opposite of most of those things. When her father dies, her mother wants to find her a suitable, sensible marriage - subtext: to some minor nobleman, probably much older, probably nice enough but not anyone Serine would pick. She instead says she will head off to the capital, become a lady-in-waiting to the queen and make her fortune. Her mother warns her that the queen is mercurial and demanding: the mother is stern and doesn't appreciate her daughter but is correct in almost everything she says in the book.

Serine, in the one dress she owns, makes her way to the capital and does become a lady-in waiting to the queen. She manages to keep that position, due to her good heart and helpful nature, despite the backbiting from the other ladies and some more active resistance from the king's advisor, who we and Serine believe has secret schemes.

She does make friends, as well: notably the maid Claire and the torturer's apprentice Leon. As required by the form, the noble characters are almost all snooty status-obsessed creeps, while members of the working class are capable, friendly, and collegial. The one exception is the kindly, sickly king, who can be whimsical as any rich character but essentially means to do right.

After various adventures and reverses, Serine is attacked and left for dead. But she returns in disguise as the king's new fool, to foil the plot she has discovered between the advisor and queen to kill the king and take over the kingdom. She does stop a few assassination attempts, and manages to nudge the king towards more compassionate governance in at least a few things, but the king, I will repeat, is old and sickly.

There is a crisis, and all looks black - as, again, is required by the form. But there is a mysterious missing heir, and Serine's work as herself and the fool has given her a large pool of goodwill to draw on, so there is the required absolutely happy ending. Serine gets everything she hoped for and more. 

Vesco's dialogue is mostly naturalistic, though her narration - which is mostly in the early scenes - leans into rhymes and a more obvious storybook-y tone. I suspect that was the tone of her novel that this bande dessinée was based on: De Cape et de Mots, also the original French title of this book. As I mentioned above, Kerascöet's work is lively and fun as always, on a mostly amusing, light-fairy-tale level, with lots of energy in gesture and layout.

The Court Charade will not surprise any but the youngest readers, but fairy tales are meant to be familiar: that's not a criticism. This is a good one, well translated into English by the mysterious L. Benson for this new Abrams edition, and it has entirely positive lessons to tell the young readers that will mostly find it. (Though, being French, there's also bits of incidental nudity and a few mildly racy moment that some particularly American parents may be shocked to see. I recommend their children hide those pages from their susceptible parents: they'll know who they are.)

The Undertaker, Vol. 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

I try to treat books on the level I find them; it's only fair. This one is the first of a decent-length series of Western comics by two French creators. It collects the first two, very closely linked books in the series, both originally published in 2015 and translated by Tom Imber for this 2026 English-language edition from Abrams.

I don't know that the Western in French comics tends to be a high-octane, big-picture genre exercise. But I suspect it does: that a French comic set in the old American West is going to be a big adventure story that is plausible on the surface but doesn't worry too much about deep thoughts as it caroms forward down its action-filled path. This one certainly does.

The Undertaker series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer, with colors by Caroline Delabie and Meyers. It is big and bold and full of characters saying dramatic things, moving smoothly from one big set-piece scene to another. I don't think you should come to this book, or probably the series in general, for gritty realism, though it does aim to be gritty and has the big action-movie style of psuedo-realism.

This first American volume collects two French bande desinée - hence the full title The Undertaker, 1: The Gold Eater & Dance of the Vultures. It's the origin story, to some degree - the main character still has some mysterious bits of his past - somewhat spoiled by the book's descriptive copy, so I think they come up quickly in later volumes - that I think sets up the rest of the series.

The book doesn't say when it's set; it's sometime in the late 19th century. A man going under the name of Jonas Crow is working as an itinerant undertaker in the usual rugged wilderness, with a black coach pulled by two horses and a vulture pal named Jed he picks up on the first pages here. He arrives in the town of Anoki City, the usual corrupt town run by one rich guy, because the rich guy, Joe Cusco, has hired Crow to bury him.

Cusco's plan is to commit suicide by poisoning - he's dying anyway - and have Crow bury him in the shaft of his first mine, the original source of his fortune. So far, so normal.

But he also converted his fortune into gold nuggets and ate all of those nuggets just before the poison; the point is to be buried with all his wealth, so no one else gets it. There's an additional several levels of manipulation by Cusco with his haughty English governess Rose (?) - that's how she's described by the flap copy; she looks to be more of a housekeeper/head of staff - and with the Chinese woman Miss Lin, to make sure his body gets to the proper place when it's supposed to, but that mostly comes out later in the book, in the inevitably revelation-filled plot.

Meanwhile, the miners of the town have been kept poor by Cusco for years or decades. They hope his death will mean some money for them, though I don't see why they would ever have that expectation. But they do expect to get some of the rich guy's money when he dies, in that something's-gonna-break sense of people pushed too far for too long. And then they learn what he actually did with the gold, and they figure on cutting him open first to grab it for themselves. For various reasons, Crow and Rose and Lin can't accept this, so they go careening out into the wilderness in the undertaker's coach, closely followed by a heavily-armed band.

There's also a local sheriff, who is more-or-less honest and not 100% on board with looting a corpse - but deeply suspicious of Crow, who he thinks is some legendary outlaw or other. And some Federal soldiers who wander into the action about mid-way through, to facilitate a chaotic multi-sided battle and ratchet up the tension and danger. But the core of the book is that chase: the undertaker and his companions ahead with a gold-filled corpse; a town full of angry men behind them.

The Undertaker is the title character of the series, so we know he wins. There's a lot of stuff along the way, though - portentous dialogue, big shootouts, daring escapes, thrilling chases, shocking reversals, amazing revelations.

I think Dorison intended to have a deep theme about greed and honesty and doing what's right despite everything, and you can line up the story to that if you want. But it comes across much cartoonier than that, to me at least, so I'll just nod in that direction.

Meyer has a detailed art style with a strong story-telling panel flow - he varies the number of panels per page, but generally gets a lot of panels onto his big pages. There's a lot of story here to get through, with dialogue to spare, and Meyer makes it all work on the page.

I don't think The Undertaker is essentially as serious as I think it wants to be taken, but it is fun and it moves quickly and it crams in a hell of a lot of Western action of the kind the kids love today. (The kids love Westerns, right?)

Gérard: Five Years with Depardieu by Mathieu Sapin

There's a point in the middle of this book where creator Mathieu Sapin claims that Gérard Depardieu is one of the two most famous living French people in the world. He says this in conversation with then-President François Hollande, who he is flattering by saying Hollande is the other most famous French person. When Sapin mentions this to other people later, they mostly agree - well, not about Hollande. He's no Depardieu.

As an American, I also agree: if you think "French actor," Depardieu is the first person who comes to mind for at least a plurality of us. For some more gender-neutral definition of "actor," I would also accept Bridgette Bardot, who is sadly not eligible under the "living" portion. Younger, hipper people might argue for Timothée Chalamet, who I don't think is "French" in the same sense, since he grew up in New York. But Depardieu is definitely world-famous, though maybe becoming less so in recent years as he's gotten older, has been in fewer really globally popular movies, and has had more scandals accumulate (tax exile, sexual assault rumors, a certain chumminess with Putin).

So: Mathieu Sapin is a French bande desinée creator - and possibly a filmmaker, too; we see him work on some projects during this book - who shares a studio with Christophe Blain. (That has nothing to with this book, but Sapin mentions it and shows Blain, so I'll include it as well.) He got pulled into a documentary involving Depardieu taking a trip to Azerbaijan - deliberately replicating a trip by Alexandre Dumas, who was accompanied by a painter - in 2012, and, since he found himself in Depardieu's circle, he thought he might try to stay there if he could and get a book out of it.

Gerard: Five Years with Depardieu is that book; it covers Sapin's experiences with Depardieu starting with that 2012 trip to Azerbaijan and continuing through Depardieu's tax exile a few years later, multiple other projects and opportunities for Depardieu to be big and dominate conversations and talk a lot, before ending with a 2016 trip to Moscow.

The point of this book is "what is Depardieu really like?" and Sapin delivers - he keeps himself involved, as a viewpoint and way into this world, but the focus is on who Depardieu is and what he does. Depardieu is famously active, volcanic, and mercurial, so he gives Sapin a lot of material - he also has the long-time actor's ability to just talk at great length about anything continuously.

Sapin draws himself as physically small and balding - that little guy in the sidecar on the cover - to contrast with the physically imposing Depardieu. He's originally hired to basically lob questions to Depardieu for that documentary, and let the actor run on at length - the one who initiates conversation, and, as much as possible, aims Depardieu at specific topics, but not an equal partner. The rest of the book finds him in roughly the same role: a chronicler, a scribbler in the corner, the guy with a dictaphone to capture the interesting or outrageous things that Depardieu rolls out endlessly, all the time.

You have to have at least some sympathy or interest in Depardieu, of course: why else would you read a book like this? I won't say that Sapin gets any deep insights into Depardieu's essential character or history, and he's not really trying to. This is a book about what's it's like to be in the middle of the whirlwind of activity that is Gérard Depardieu; what happens around him and how he talks and acts on a day-to-day basis. Sapin is not intervewing Depardieu; he's accompanying him.

It's a very wordy book: Depardieu talks a lot, and Sapin needs a lot of captions to explain who everyone is and what's going on, as he drops in and out of Depardieu's life and projects repeatedly over these five years. Sapin has a lightly cartoony style: most of his people are fairly realistic, though he makes himself tiny with a big head. But his background and scenes are mostly realistic, though sometimes lightly sketched, particularly on the pages where he has a lot of captions and dialogue to make room for.

There will be a point where Gérard Depardieu is not longer the most famous Frenchman in the world, and this book will be an interesting relic at that point. But I don't think we're there yet.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

It was a long time ago, but I think it happened quickly.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol.2: The Return - my library app has a slight disagreement with itself as to the subtitle, so you may also see The Comeback some places - was published in French by Dargaud in 2000, the same year as the first volume. This version took a lot longer: it was translated by Mercedes Claire Gillion and lettered by Sylvain Dumas for a 2018 e-book-only Europe Comics edition, which is, I think, still the only way this book is available in the English language.

Like the first book, it was written by the prolific Lewis Trondheim and drawn by the energetic Manu Larcenet. It follows directly from the first book; you could click my link above to get a precis of the story if you want or need that. Or, if you prefer to remain ignorant of the plot details of the first book, stop reading now.

Elementary-schoolers Martina and Gildas learned in the first Cosmonauts that their seemingly-paranoid worries were correct: everyone around them was an alien and/or robot (mostly robots made to look like humans by aliens). They were, they were told, clones of the "survivors" of the crash of a human spaceship on this alien world, and were being raised in a close simulacrum of their original lives on Earth by the kindly aliens of the planet Mawis.

Now, they know the truth...but they're still kids, and need to grow up. So all of the robots around them admit to being robots, but school goes on - with some changes, such as the "Exterminating Stinky Aliens" class taught by Professor Vatter.

But, like so many stories told to children, they learn early in this book that what they were told is true...but not complete.

There are nasty aliens: the Meskimek. A Meskimek ship is approaching, and will destroy all life on Mawis. The Mawissians, unfortunately, venerate life so much that they are physically incapable of fighting back.

So the only people on the planet capable of violence are the cloned members of the human crew: Gildas and Martina. Who are maybe eight or nine years old.

But are they the only survivors of that crash? Are there more secrets of their past yet to be discovered?

Well, of course. It would be a short book if the stinky aliens just swept in and killed everybody.

This one is more action-oriented than the first book, as there's a hostile Mekimek fleet chasing our heroes' spaceship nearly continuously for the back three-quarters of the story. This is popular fiction, so of course they survive, learn the truth, and save their friends - and, since it's arguably a book for kids, they also learn some lessons along the way. (Although I should note that European comics "for kids" have a substantially higher amount of violence - very cartoony violence, all zap-rays and explosions, admittedly - than some readers may be comfortable handing to their little Taylors and Liams.)

Larcenet has a very distinctive style here, with lots of often-small panels to get all the action in and people with weird but very readable faces. This is zany but has an undercurrent of real emotion, as I've come to expect from Trondheim. This is a fun, goofy soft-SF comics series, and I'm happy to note that there's still one more to go.

Glorious Summers, Vol.2: The Calanque by Zidrou and Jordi Lafebre

As Spring in my area has been chilly and damp, and I had an official company-wide Mental Health day, I indulged myself with a nostalgic book about a long, wonderful summer vacation - warm and relaxing and seemingly endless. (All of of those aspects were a nice contrast.)

Glorious Summers is a six-book series by writer Zidrou (Belgian) and artist Jordi Lafebre (Spanish), originally published fairly quickly in French during the teens. The first five books were translated into English - this one by Lara Vergnaud - soon afterward, but they're all from Europe Comics, which is more of a proof-of-concept than a major publisher, so you can only find them digitally.

Each one, I think, is about one year - one long summer vacation in the life of the Belgian Faldérault family. The first book was set in 1973, and had a light frame story in the modern day. This second one, The Calanque, is set in 1969 and wastes no time in other frames.

I have two thoughts before I dive into how wonderful and lovely this book is - and it is wonderful and lovely, the best kind of nostalgia.

First is informative: a calanque is what you call a fjord in French, or maybe what looks something like a fjord when it's on France's Mediterranean coast. It's a narrow, steep-walled inlet of the sea - you've probably seen them, looking untouched and beautiful, in a dozen comics and movies and other visual media, without knowing it had a French name. (I did.)

Second is more ruminative, or predictive. Each book is about one year, and they might cluster in this time-frame. Pierre and Maddie Faldérault were young in 1973, and they're four years younger here - with three children under the age of about seven and a fourth on the way. I think that's the premise of the series: this era in their lives. But I'm hoping for something to break the mold, later on. Maybe a book set in 1962 or 3, with Maddie pregnant with their first child or the two of them trying to get away with a new baby. Maybe a book set in 1982, with the older girls coming back from university or école, maybe jetting in to join the rest. I'd like to see nostalgia for other phases of life: the thing about kids is that they're always changing, and when you look back, you realize every year is a completely different era. I don't know if the series went that way, but I can hope.

In this book, BD artist Pierre is working full-out to finish his latest assignment so his family can go on vacation - just as we saw in the first book, running over their supposed departure date by three days. He's delivering the first installment of a new series he created, Four, about a four-armed sheriff in the American West. (Westerns were popular in Eurocomics, then and to some degree even now.)

He does finish; they do set off. And, in what I think is characteristic of this family, they don't have a specific destination in mind. They're going to camp anyway, so they don't need hotel reservations, and they're going to be gone for a month or two, so they're in no hurry. [1] The point is to go south - toward the Mediterranean, into the sunshine, down into France - for this family, to go to the land of summer.

The first night, they find a place to camp after dark - and it turns out to be the front yard of an older French couple. Luckily, they're happy to see a boisterous Belgian family camping on their lawn, and give the Faldéraults both a place to stay for a day (feeding them very well) and a tip on a place to spend the rest of the summer: a cabin in a calanque, on the sunny southern coast.

The rest of the book is set in that calanque, as they snorkel and fish and sunbathe and loaf and sing random songs and reenact the moon landing they just saw on TV. The brother of "Old Man Rufus" - half of the friendly French couple - lives nearby and also befriends the family, taking them to the local town in his boat for supplies.

Zidrou shows a real knack in this series for the small rhythms of life, of the running jokes a family creates and the quirks individual kids have at particular times in their lives. The Faldéraults are specific and quirky - maybe a bit weird, which the French always attribute to their being Belgian. They enjoy life, and are getting the most out of this vacation: memories to hold onto for the next long year and cold winter.

And Lafebre's art continues to be a delight, with expressive animation-inspired character design and poses on cleanly laid-out pages mostly drenched in that French sunlight. Glorious Summers is a series that makes you wish you grew up somewhere in driving distance of France in summer, and had two months a year to enjoy it.

[1] I don't know if the camping thing is a generational marker. In a US context, it might be - my own grandparents, both schoolteachers, headed off into the woods every summer for much of the summer for decades (the late '40s through at least the early '80s), though they stayed much closer to their home (Albany, NY) than the adventurous Faldéraults. My sense is that my mother and her sisters were not as fond of this as their parents, so it was not repeated with my generation. I think that kind of roughing-it camping is much rarer, at least in US culture, in the 21st century than it was in the mid-20th.

The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

The influential and stylish French six-book space opera bande dessinée series named after its McGuffin, the Incal, moves into its second half with this book. By this point, series hero John DiFool still has some distinctive characterization - mostly of his negative traits, but we'll take what we can get - while most of the people around him have been smoothed out and perfected by the ongoing fate-of-the-universe plot. As always, it's written by moviemaker and international goofball Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by French master cartoonist Mœbius; the whole series originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the '80s, with the current edition having gone back to the French original to strip out some emendations made by Marvel in their earlier English-language reprinting. This volume was translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, who do the best they can do with Jodorowsky's bombastic, silly dialogue.

To catch up on the background quickly: in the previous three books (The Black Incal, The Luminous Incal, and What Lies Beneath) John found that Incal, a sentient, glowing super-powerful thingy destined to bring balance to the galaxy in much the same way that Anakin Skywalker would in his own universe a couple of decades later. In typical mystical-space-opera fashion, everything was a duality: there were dark and light Incals, which needed to merge; two women who are sisters and guardians of the two Incals; a Great Darkness threatening the human empire that is opposed to the combined Incals; and so forth. John did the hero's-journey thing, turning enemies into allies, going on a dangerous journey to the heart of his world, where the Incals merged and turned into a super-cool spaceship - this is an '80s space opera - and one of the minor characters was subsumed into the Incal gestalt.

John and his allies are in that spaceship as The Incal, Vol.4: What Is Above begins. The evil Techno organization - I'm not sure what the overall name is; the Technopope is dead and their headquarters habitat of Technogea is run by the Techno-Centreur and the Cyclic Council, so they're the Techno-somebodies - has taken over human space and is proceeding with their evil plans to seed the universe with Shadow Eggs, semi-living manifestations of the evil Great Darkness. Those shadow eggs will eat all of the stars and then...I'm not really sure. Probably kill everyone; it's that kind of ha-ha-ha evil plot. It's not clear why the Technodudes want to do that; I suspect it's mostly that Jodorowsky assumes techno-anything is evil, and is attributing to them everything he doesn't like in life.

The Incal-starship has powerful weapons, but they can only break shadow eggs into pieces, which then re-form. They need a more organic solution to defeat Techno-ness and Darkness.

So they fly off to the prison planet Aquaend, where the minor character Raimo of Kamar and his crew have already been exiled, discovering a hidden undersea city Vitavil H2O where the locals live in harmony with the native gigantic medusas. (Medusa in the French-language sense of a jellyfish rather than a lady with a stunning gaze.) Those medusa somehow have the power to envelop and destroy shadow eggs, because gigantic sea-dwelling semi-sentients clearly have the power of space-travel, and so the giant wave of Techno shadow eggs is met by and destroyed by a wave of human-guided space-traveling medusas.

Vitavil H2O is also the current home of the human empire's semi-deposed Emperoress, thought dead. But no, he/she fled and is ready to re-take control of the human worlds once the little matter of the Technofellas is resolved.

That gets us about halfway through the book, so it's time to switch gears. The alien Berg race - from the next galaxy over, and invading human space intermittently over the past three books - is about to have its Five Thousand Year Games, in which a few hundred members of some alien race are gathered to fight to the death in the inevitable sandy arena. The single winner of the Five Thousand Year Games gets the honor of impregnating the Berg's Protoqueen - who may be immortal; this isn't clear - and then being disintegrated. After 24,000 such games, legend says, the Bergs will "enter the golden age of eternal prosperity."

This is, of course, the twenty-four-thousandth Games. The competitors this time are all humans. And John must compete - and win! - the game to fulfil the Incal's plans, fucking the giant bowl of goop that is the Protoqueen. (She first extrudes a body that closely resembles John's love Animah, to make the fucking somewhat more palatable.)

In the end, John does not avoid his inevitable post-coital disintegration, but he gets better with the help of his friends. Technogea is attacked and conquered by the forces of righteousness and Incal-hood. Our heroes seem to be entirely triumphant, with two books left to fill, but - shock! horror! - they learn that the Emperoress has been infected by the Great Darkness through a "psycho virus" and is now the new focus of its aims. This is our ending cliffhanger.

Mœbius's art is lovely and muscular; I still have the lurking suspicion that the people who really love this series first saw it before it was translated and don't read French. Jodorowsky's writing is full of super-science and mysticism in almost equal proportions, any distinctive characterization has mostly retreated by this point so his characters can explain the convoluted plot to the reader. I may seem dismisive, but it is definitely fun on a space opera level, full of bizarre ideas, weird technology, and shocking reversals. And there's still two books to go, as it gets bigger and crazier in the usual space-opera way.

The Alliance of the Curious, #2: Neandertalensis by Philippe Riche

I can't tell if Philippe Riche made any comics after this one. He did the two Bad Break books about 2003, this two-book series in 2006, and nothing since. But he also seems to be the same Philippe Riche who works in animation, and that Riche is credited with directing a movie released this year - so he might have just gotten busy with other things.

(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.

Brain Drain, Part 1 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

This much is true: when Albert Einstein died in 1955, his brain was removed by the pathologist, divided into 240 sections, and, over the next couple of decades, somewhat divvied out to researchers. This only became widely known in 1978. There is, inevitably, a Wikipedia article about it.

Pierre-Henry Gomont's bande dessinée series Brain Drain tells a fictional version of that story. The first half of the story - published as Brain Drain, Part 1 by Dargaud in 2020 and apparently translated into English the same year by Edward Gauvin - sees Gomont getting a little cutesy with those facts. He changes the names slightly - the dead luminary is only called "Professor Albert" and the pathologist, actually Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, is here called "Stolz." And the ghost - or something - of Einstein is a major character. Gomont also diverges from the true history - more so than just having Einstein "alive" and commenting on the action - by making Stolz a horndog for a cute blonde neurologist and introducing rather more drama and running-about than I think the real Dr. Harvey saw.

Well, let me just point to that cover, which seems slightly (and oddly) a Fabulous Freak Brothers homage - that sets the tone for the whole exercise. Gomont has a aggressive line with a lot of mid-century influence in it, matching cleanly-drawn but lumpy people with slashing but precise backgrounds and objects. He also has an equally aggressive narrative tone: this is a story, and he's going to tell it to us, in a clear, detached, omniscient voice.

So "Professor Albert" dies, and "Stolz" performs the autopsy and announces the results to the assembled media. So far, so normal - but Stolz also, on what Gomont presents as a whim or a mania - or a way to get into the pants of that blonde neurologist - removes the brain and hides it, just before the body goes to be cremated.

(The real Dr. Harvey also removed Einstein's eyeballs and gave them to the dead professor's ophthalmologist. Stolz in this book does nothing similar. The historical Dr. Harvey also seems to have been substantially less secretive, making the whole thing more of a conspiracy among doctors, or just a "we doctors know best how to handle these things; we don't need to consider the patient's wishes" attitude.)

After the cremation, an older man shows up at Stolz's house, with the top of his head missing. It is, of course "Professor Albert." He seems to be physical and real in every way - he takes up space, drives cars, is seen by other people, and so on. He's also something like Stolz's Jiminy Cricket, and something like a canary in a coal mine about the state of the removed brain (which, in this book, is sitting in a glass jar, in some kind of liquid - formaldehyde, maybe? purified water? some manner of alcohol? - inside a box, in Stolz's basement).

Anyway, It Is Wacky. Stolz tries to connect with the executor of Professor Albert's estate - it seems to be widely known, or suspected, that Professor Albert's brain is still floating around - but has no luck there. Then large men in suits, who claim to be some kind of government investigators, come nosing around, and Stolz has to flee with the brain and Professor Albert.

This book is only part 1, so it ends with them on the run. Presumably, the second half will wrap up the story, though I don't see how it can reconnect with the actual historical record at this point. (The actual historical record is mostly "Dr, Harvey gave out pieces of the brain to his colleagues, and nothing much happened for twenty years," which is pretty boring in a BD.)

I would not read this hoping it will tell you the real history; it will not. But it is an energetic, goofy story told with a clear voice in a distinctive tone, with wonderful art, and I think Gomont has a point that he's driving the story to. So if the story of the removed brain of a famous historical figure doesn't squick you out, you might want to take a look.

Days of Sugar and Spice by Loïc Clément and Anne Montel

We tend to think of certain genres as being intrinsically tied to a medium - sometimes, right up until the point where it's obvious they do translate into other media. Think superheroes: they were clearly something that only worked right on the comics page - until special effects and other moviemaking skills leveled up enough to equal it.

Specifically, I thought of a certain kind of romance - Young Woman with a Modern Urban Job in The Big City goes back to Quaint Childhood Village, meets A Nice Guy with A Quirky Job there, possibly has An Inconvenient Inheritance that forces her to Confront Her Past and Think What She Wants Out of Life, possibly has a Sassy Friend to Provide Commentary and Drive Her to a Realization - was inherently cinematic.

Well, by "cinematic" I mean filmed and two hours long. But probably an original on The Hallmark Channel.

I'm here to tell you today that writer Loïc Clément and artist Anne Montel successfully ported that genre into bande dessinée form with Days of Sugar and Spice, originally published in France by Dargaud in 2016 and in the Montana Kane translation I read by Europe Comics in 2019.

The woman is Rose Lemon; she's about thirty - as required by the form - and works as a freelance graphic designer in Paris, that job also right down the broad middle of the genre. She has a particularly annoying client who keeps making stupid changes, as required. Her contact at the client is also the requisite Big City Man Who Is Her Current FWB But Doesn't Appreciate Her - his name is Edouard, and we never see him on the page. Rose lives with her best friend Mei, the sassy truth-teller.

Her mother is dead; something vaguely tragic and not entirely specified a few years in the past.

But her father, whom she was estranged from since her parents separated twenty years ago, has just now died. And he's left his boulangerie, Brav Eo, to her.

So she has to take the train, down through scenic Brittany, to the small town of Klervi. There, local lawyer Joseph Doré tells her the town is slowly dying: their big industry (an oil refinery) closed up a couple of decades ago, and, since then, the local Largaux vineyard has been buying up properties as locals retire, die, or leave. Largaux has a growing staff of low-paid workers - probably migrants, though this point isn't stressed - that it low-key exploits. But the important point is that they control more and more of the quaint old town, and, once they get enough of it, are going to replace this real (if dying) town with "an American-style attraction." (Think some weird fusion of Disneyland and a studio tour, featuring a fakey version of the winery.)

Shock! Horror!

Doré tells Rose all of this; he clearly wants her to keep the boulangerie running. She just wants to sell it - to Largaux if necessary - and get back to her real life.

But she misses the last train out that day - trains are deeply inconvenient, and regularly missed, in romantic stories like this one - and has to spend the night at Brav Eo. On the way through those enchanting streets, she runs into her childhood friend Gael Fougiére, now the much-beloved schoolteacher of Klervi. And she learns her half-forgotten great-aunt Marronde is still living next door to Brav Eo and had been working in the boulangerie, but had a stroke a few years back and now cannot speak.

She misses the train in the morning, too, and ends up wandering about town with Gael. She's clearly attracted to him - the form requires it - and she ends up apologizing to him and Marronde about her bad attitude, and staying in Klervi longer than expected.

Long enough to find an old diary of her father's, full of "his baking experiments," which she takes back to Paris to read, and soon starts baking those recipes she finds in it.

Does she go back to Klervi, to start a situationship with Gael and re-open the boulangerie? Is that re-opening at first very unsuccessful, until she connects more closely with the local community? Does her sassy friend come for an extended visit, bringing heaping helpings of sass? Does Rose flee back to Paris after a Fateful Discovery, but eventually come back for the Happy Ending?

I hope I don't need to answer any of those questions.

Clément keeps the tone light, with a Greek Chorus of local cats that comment on the action several times during the book. He also organizes it all into chapters, each named after one kind of pastry - some more informed critic could tell you if there's some kind of progression or sequence of those names; I can just note that they're all yummy things I'd be happy to eat from a quaint pastry shop in Brittany. Montel draws it with an equally light line, illustrative and often vignetted rather than having panel borders; that and her soft colors (pencils?) gives the whole thing a warm, personal, almost sketchbook feel.

Days of Sugar and Spice will not surprise you, but who comes to a Hallmark Romance for surprise? It tells its genre story skillfully and has a good, crabby, particular heroine in Rose: she's the kind of person the reader wants to see happy in the end, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Incredible! by Zabus & Hippolyte

Before I dive into the details of this book, I just want to take a moment to note how far above its weight Belgium punches in the comics world. It's comparable in size and population to the state I live in (New Jersey), similarly sandwiched between bigger, noisier powers (France and Germany for Belgium, New York and Philadelphia for New Jersey) and divided culturally in a similar way. Although, I should note that the gulf between Flemings and Walloons is substantially more fraught than the debate about whether to call one's breakfast meat "pork roll" or "Taylor ham."

And yet, it's not the French comics ecosystem that dominates Europe - it's the Franco-Belgian comics world. With Belgium second in the name, sure, but close to equal with a country that has twenty times its physical size and five times its population. I don't know why - maybe Belgium has Chinese-style academies for fomenting their children's comics-making power, to funnel them into the 9th art? But it's a whole thing, has been for two or three generations now, and this book is deeply Belgian in an unapologetic way that might be notable from some other small country. But, with Belgium and comics, it's just to be expected - Belgium is the land of comics.

Incredible! is a 2020 bande dessinée, originally published by Dargaud in Europe, with this Europe Comics English-language edition coming out the same year in this Joseph Laredo translation. It's written by Zabus and drawn by Hippolyte, two more of those single-named creators so common in Europe (and somewhat baffling to me) - both of whom, as far as I can tell, are new to me. But, again, it's a big Franco-Belgian world of comics, most of which never gets translated into English to begin with, and I've never tried to be comprehensive anyway.

I don't think this is for children, exactly, though it's the kind of book that's fine for most ages. But it is about a child: Jean-Loup, an eleven-year-old Belgian boy. Even if the book didn't tell us explicitly that he was Belgian, the fact that his confidant and basically only friend is a figurine of the then-Belgian king (the story is set in 1983, for possibly semi-autobiographical reasons) would be a major clue.

Jean-Loup is a stutterer, quiet and withdrawn at school, not wanting to call attention to himself. He has a lot of rituals and rules for himself, which we see on his way home from school - we think he may have OCD, or something similar. He lives with his father, who is distant and busy - we don't see the father on the page. Jean-Loup spends his time researching things intensively, writing down facts on little cards, and organizing those cards - so he has a large collection of knowledge, or semi-random things, that he built himself and knows pretty deeply.

His mother is dead. He talks to a funerary urn of her ashes. And he's got some externalized guilt and fear related to his family - we don't know exactly why, but he's an imaginative kid who sees (at least in this book, in comics form to make it visual) visions of his relatives and that Belgian king, nagging and demanding and exhorting and criticizing him all of the time.

So Jean-Loup is a smart, interesting kid with a lot of stuff to deal with, much of it deeply personal - things he doesn't tell anyone else.

And his class at school is having a series of oral presentations. Jean-Loup has prepared his, on a topic carefully constructed to be very boring (so he doesn't draw attention) and very thorough (so he gets a good grade). But things go wrong on the morning of his presentation, and he leaves his notes behind - so he ends up talking off the cuff about his latest research project, the thing he's currently passionate about: the burial customs of people around the world. He's riveting, energetic, engaging his audience and full of facts that he has right at the tip of his fingers.

His teacher gives him a high grade - and also asks him to be their school's representative in a regional presentation contest. He'd have to do a new presentation: slightly more formal, somewhat longer, on a new topic. Jean-Loup immediately agrees - and never regrets or goes back on that decision.

But it's not easy. His father can't take him to the regional competition - in another city a few weeks later - so his deeply unreliable uncle Johnny Gala has to do it. And, even before that, Jean-Loup wants to ask the advice of the Belgian king on his topic - I think this is one part "Belgium is a small enough country that this isn't a completely insane idea" and one part "Jean-Loup is really caught up in his fantasies and thinks this is a completely reasonable idea," so Johnny Gala has to drive him there.

Johnny's car is unreliable, and breaks down on both trips - but Jean-Loup does meet with the king, briefly, and he he does make it to the competition on time, in the end.

Other things happen, too - there's some family history that we learn along the way, and some changes for Jean-Loup - but that's all part of the journey.

There is a happy ending, slightly bigger than I expected, with Jean-Loup triumphant and happy and (we think) somewhat better positioned in life and somewhat less mentally unsteady.

Zabus tells this story in a slightly more ornate, detailed style than the reader might expect - giving more detail, going down more side-alleys, adding more grace-notes - which works, given Jean-Loup's mania for research and his cabinets crammed full of little cards of facts. Hippolyte draws it in a cartoony style, his figures often lightly outlined and his colors giving at least a pop of sunniness - often from Jean-Loup's blonde hair - on every page. His panels are regular and square, but with loose, rough edges, and his watercolors keep that softness, like a haze of memory taking us back to 1983.

Incredible! is a sweet, positive book suitable for eleven-year-olds like Jean-Loup and anyone who has been eleven, in 1983 or since then. I do suspect some aspects of it are semi-autobiographical, but I have no idea how many or how much.

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

First of all: I'm surprised to see the "Vol. 1" after reading the book; this walks and talks like a standalone. But I suppose it was successful, because it got two sequels. 

I believe Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 1 was the first time Lewis Trondheim (here the writer) collaborated with Manu Larcenet (here the artist) - this was originally published in France by Dargaud way back in 2000. They later (along with Joan Sfar) did a few volumes in the Dungeon series, under the Parade subseries, but I think that's been it - according to Wikipedia, they haven't done a project together in two decades.

I think Cosmonauts was aimed at kids, but I could be wrong: it's fairly sophisticated, and the kids at the center of the story are weird kids. On the other hand, it is French, where the ecosystem for comics of all types is deeper and more complex than in North America.

Martina and Gildas are elementary-schoolers, in some fairly urban place somewhere. This is French, so we could call it Paris and probably be right, or close enough. Gildas is new to the class; we see him join on his first day. Martina is already there, and Gildas is given the seat next to her.

Martina thinks everyone else but her is a robot, designed to pretend they're real and make it seem like she's living on normal Earth. Gildas thinks she's wrong: everyone but him is an alien pretending they're real and making it seem like they're living on normal Earth. Despite their differences of opinion, they become friends, tentatively each accepting that the other is real and not a robot or alien.

They then go about trying to prove their slightly competing theses, as a preparation to exterminating the aliens/robots to save Earth. This is in the humorous mode, so their attempts to confound or cause violent harm to people to reveal their robot or alien nature are played for laughs - mostly.

Martina and Gildas do learn the truth, and this is the kind of book where the truth isn't "they're just very imaginative kids, and will grow out of it." It does all work out amusingly, and the kids get to be the ones driving the plot the whole way. Larcenet's cartoony style makes the occasional violence funny, and works well with Trondheim's script, which has quite a lot of long speeches, since these are the kind of kids who don't shut up about about their crazy theories.

As usual with Trondheim, the humor gets a bit dark and existential, but he keeps the kids central and important: this really is their story, and, in the end, it's about how they were right. As I started off by saying, I'm not quite sure where Trondheim and Larcenet could go from here, so I suppose I need to read the sequels and find out. And any book that leaves the reader with a thought like that is clearly a success.

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas

About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey's Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn't entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.

A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald's Happiest Adventures similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure '60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.

The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim's Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn't break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He's also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim's self-portrait in Little Nothings.

But if you're going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently - not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.

Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely - Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge's motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice - but he's not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he's looking for.)

Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters - the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on - as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.

It's a fairly talky story, because it's about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn't have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)

As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It's not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim's point: there's no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.

As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can't quite call off-model but doesn't quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim's long speeches - and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial. 

Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the '60s origin is...how do I put this delicately?...not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I'm sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you're looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure - and why not? it's a fun mix - Donald's Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.

Glorious Summers, Vol.1: Southbound! by Zidrou and Jordi Lefebre

This is not autobiographical. The main character is indeed a man who makes comics for a living and lives in Belgium, like Zidrou, the writer of the series. But Pierre Faldérault is a good two decades older than his creator, and is an artist - we see him laboring over his drawing board at the beginning of the story, finishing up his work so the family can go on their summer vacation.

(And it is very much a European summer vacation - they have a month, so they can go somewhat aimlessly and - even more importantly - if they get delayed three days at the start because Pierre is frantically coloring the last pages of "Daddy Clown," that's not such a big deal.)

Glorious Summers is a six-volume series - the first five of which were translated into English almost a decade ago - written by Zidrou and drawn by Jordi Lefebre. They'd done the one-off Lydie a few years before, and apparently worked well together. This first book, Southbound! was published in French by Dargaud in 2015, and this Lara Vergnaud translation came out from Europe Comics in 2018.

I suspect the whole series is told in flashbacks; this one certainly is. We start with Pierre and his wife Maddie in what is probably the modern day - older, settled, happy, as they go to a place where they vacationed many years before. They remember the year 1973, and the rest of the story is told then.

Pierre's career is not terribly stable; he's never had a big hit but does keep getting work from BD magazines. Maddie works in a store selling shoes, and hates it - she notes that she's been moved from one department to another, finding each one worse and worse. She's also on the verge of leaving Pierre, for the kind of reasons that are too big to explain. This, they think, will be the last family vacation - after the summer, she'll take the kids to her mother.

There are four children, all young - the squabbling girls Nicole and Julie, their younger brother Louis with his head always in a Lucky Luke book, and the pre-schooler Paulette. They're fun, quirky kids - each one gets some personality, from the bookish Louis with his imaginary friend Beekoo the Squirrel to each of the three girls - and Zidrou and Lefebre do a great job of showing the ways a family has rituals (we must always get fries when crossing back into Belgium!) and running jokes and just silly standard turns of phrases.

It's a happy family, mostly - the way any family is mostly happy. There is that looming possible separation. And there's also some mostly off-stage drama involving Pierre's brother Xavier, which affects this vacation a lot, in the end.

Southbound! is a story of the day-to-day, focused on the part of life when you can get away from the grind and spend time with your family, the times when memories are made and families are as strong and connected as they get. Zidrou keeps his story mostly mundane - there is the Xavier thread, and the potential breakup looming, but those aren't central. It's mostly about a few days together. And Lefebre draws it all beautifully - his people just a bit cartoony to have energy, but embedded in a realistic world we recognize.

For a lot of European readers, I expect Glorious Summers was an exercise in nostalgia - remembering their own childhood vacations, whether to rural France as here or to some Mediterranean beach or holiday camp or extended family or wherever. Remembering when they were younger, either as kids or young parents, and the memories made then. Americans could easily find similar things to love in it, even if, sadly, we don't get to go off for a month at a time.

Ordinary Victories, Vol.4: Swing That Hammer by Manu Larcenet

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

The publishing consortium Europe Comics - which, as I understand it, is somewhere between a rights clearing-house and a pan-company cooperative project - went through some upheavals three years ago. (He said, understating the case.) See their website for the confusing announcement that they would continue to release a few books a month but would stop all "consumer-facing activities." [1] At the same time, everything from Europe disappeared overnight from the app my library uses, including several dozen things I'd flagged that I wanted to read.

That was sad, but I resigned myself to it, and have been reading other things.

And then I stumbled across a book that used to be on my list, and discovered that, at some point in the past two years, the corpus of Europe Comics had miraculously reappeared on the Hoopla app. I spent some happy time re-flagging things that I probably had flagged before - who can remember, exactly? - and tried to think if I was in the middle of anything at the time.

There was one series that I'd almost finished in 2023: Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, a transmuted memoir about a photographer named Marco, the shipyard where his father used to work, his newish partner and the birth and first years of their first child. It was a four-book series - originally published in French in the Aughts, translated into English once soon afterward, and then again around 2016 for this four-volume edition, in a naturalistic tone I've really liked by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

The first three were Ordinary Victories, Trivial Quantities, and Precious Things. The fourth, final book is Swing That Hammer.

Swing has the same low-key, everyday feeling as the earlier books. It's well-observed, personal, specific - but small, in the way that any one life is small. This book sees a lot of major changes: Marco and Emily's daughter is getting big enough to talk and wander about and ask questions, the shipyard is finally closing down for good to be redeveloped, and an elderly neighbor Marco had befriended is suddenly gone. There's more than that, but those are the major points: like any life, it keeps going, and things keep changing. Swing has less to do with Marco's career than the earlier books; it's more focused on his personal life.

Larcenet's art is still wonderful here, with an ease and grace to his line and characters that are full of life. The whole series is warm and true and real - not quite autobiography, but close to it, an alternate-world version of the real Larcenet's life, told cleanly and with clear vision and a quiet sense of time and space. I recommend the whole series - especially now that they're back - to anyone who likes comics about real people living real lives.

[1] I think I've said this in the past, but, just to be clear: releasing a book is part of publishing. But it's not the most important part. Getting that book in front of an audience - all of those "consumer-facing activities" - are at least as important to the publishing process as shoving content onto pages (dead-tree or electronic). Of course, Europe Comics is not primarily an enterprise aimed at consumers to begin with - it's largely a proof-of-concept for the books it does, and its goal is for bigger companies to buy the rights, so Europe can take down their editions and someone else actually publish the book with a bigger splash. So their change wasn't strange in retrospect, but it is definitely odd if you think of them as a publisher.

The Age of Video Games by Jean Zeid & Émilie Rouge

Comics are a global industry; they're created in all corners of the world, and often travel far from their native shores, if the content works in the new countries. That's a good thing: something to be celebrated and encouraged.

Andrews McMeel, though, does not seem to agree. They have gone out of their way to disguise that the book The Age of Video Games - published in 2024 by Les Arènes, in 2025 by AMcM - is  originally - gasp! horror! - French.

They bury their copyright page at the very end of the book, and bury deeply there the credit "translated and lettered by Jen Vaughn" - note that this includes a fairly substantial part of the credits of the book, and I'm just talking about the lettering here. It's all pointless, because this is a book by two people named Jean Zeid (a man named Jean; even the dimmest AMcM executive must realize that screams French) and Émilie Rouge (which also sounds pretty clearly French).

Zeid is a journalist who has focused on video games; Rouge is an illustrator who has done a variety of things (there's a whole section of fake media on her site that I bet is from some single unnamed project, and it fascinates me). Here they appear as themselves to explore the whole global history of video games in a little under two hundred and fifty pages. 

The frame story is fun and a bit frivolous: Zeid and Rouge are joined by "Roby," a flying talking robot thingy, who looks like a handheld console, and maybe is supposed to be one, and they have video-game-ish travails several times over the course of the book.

But the core of the book is a detailed, well-sourced overview of video games, in all of its manifestations, starting with Space War! in 1960 and moving forward from there. Well, repeatedly moving forward from there - games had multiple, mostly separate strands, especially in the early decades, so Zeid and Rouge have separate chapters on arcade games, home consoles, and home PCs that overlap in time and occasionally in characters. The later chapters, once the field had professionalized and mostly merged, continues the story forward through the '80s and '90s and so forth, each chapter focusing on one time period or one major change (CD-ROMs and the '90s wave of consoles, casual games on phones, multiplayer games played via networks, etc.)

They find space to show a lot of people; this is a book that credits individuals for their work, and not just faceless corporations. So we see the famous names, like Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, but also a lot of historically-important figures and newer indy-game makers. Zeid and Rogue seem to be trying to be both global and inclusive; they specifically mention a lot of women creators, possibly slightly out of proportion to their impact on the field.

And there is that light overall story, with the avatars of creators Zeid and Rouge, plus the robot/console/AI Roby, who - as required by an AI in anything video-game-related - will need to be defeated in the final level.

It's a fairly big book, with lots of detail, told in an engaging way. Zeid is clearly an expert, and Rouge makes fun pages - colorful but slightly desaturated, somewhat cartoony but not really looking like a video game, which I found very appealing. (I can imagine a version of this book that tried to look like a modern AAA title throughout, or that changed art style every chapter to match the look of the era it's representing - Rouge does a little of the latter, for spice and style, but keeps most of her work consistent, which I appreciated.)

Big comics histories of random things seem to be at least a minor genre in France, and we've been seeing many of them making their way to the US in translation. I prefer it when publishers actually make that clear - unlike Andrews McMeel here - but just having the books is a good thing, especially when they're as amusing and informative as this one.

The Incal, Vol.3: What Lies Beneath by Alexandro Jodorowosky & Mœbius

The Incal series is set in a space-opera universe, and I don't think we get a good sense of how it all works - like most space opera, things are big and flashy, with exotic names and complex factions, and the scope is vast. We do see what seems to be the seat of government for this entire polity in this book: the ruler of the human galaxy, and its equivalent of a Congress or Council of Ministers. And I think we're supposed to at least root for one group there, the human crew of a starship who bring a shocking report to the top of their government, but the rest of the political maneuvering was vaguer and less clear, other than a vague "all of these people are corrupt and unpleasant" sense. Maybe that is the point.

The Incal books are a mystical space opera: they're not about strength fixing what's wrong with this universe, battling evil and overwhelming it. They're about what I suppose I should call right-mindedness transforming that universe by the power of its better paradigm. And I should admit that those kind of stories tend to annoy me: I can still probably still work up a good head of steam thinking about Rick Veitch's The One, which is another "if only we all lost every bit of individuality and specificity to be loving cosmic gloop, everyone would be eternally happy and perfect" story.

I don't recall how far The Incal goes in that direction by the end; I think not quite as far.

This is the third of six books, The Incal, Vol. 3: What Lies Beneath. Like the whole series, it was written by filmmaker and visionary Alexandro Jodorowsky and drawn by Mœbius. These stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early '80s in French and were collected as this book in 1984; the first English edition was from Marvel in 1988 and this corrected edition, translated by Justin Kelly and Sasha Watson, came out in 2013.

As of the end of the second book, the main cast - six humans and a concrete seagull - were hurtling down into the center of their planet. I think I called it "Earth" when talking about the previous books; here we learn this is actually Ter21, one minor world in this far-future polity. See my posts on the first and second Incal books for how we got here, including who these characters are and why they used to hate each other. But they have rapidly lost most of the personality traits that were important earlier: they spend most of this book doing Spielbergian pointing and gasping, or functioning as explanations of the plot, often as speech bubbles pointed at an object.

(There are a number of panels late in this book featuring back-and-forth dialogue, pointed at a spaceship or that spaceship's precursor, where there's no way to tell who is saying what, and no difference in the voice of any of the characters. They all function as Jodorowsky explaining his themes.)

The action of this book is mostly those people doing the old journey to enlightenment thing: down into the depths of their world, through an ocean of garbage, battling the nasty and violent locals, chased by an implacable robot, down and down and down through strange and wondrous places until they hit the point where they can ascend. Late in the book, they do a lot of talking to each other about the significance of their journey: "We're forming an entity of transdimensional energy!" announces one of them.

Meanwhile, we do see that human crew, first on the way to the seat of their government, then presenting there, and then what happens afterward. Note that this is not the kind of story where talking persuasively or "normal channels" in general or human government are ever going to be seen in a positive light, and set your expectations accordingly. The only hope for humanity is The Incal.

Something I noticed this time, which is a bit disconcerting: our hero John DiFool, and Animah, the carrier of the other Incal, are shown as physically different while they have the Incals. In their better, purer form, they have lighter, almost neotenic features, are taller, speak quietly and with authority. Once they lose the incals, they have coarser features and notably much darker skin, besides being vastly more emotional. It's not quite racially coded, but it tends in that direction in an uncomfortable way.

Anyway, the two incals merge with some other stuff to form a spaceship, and one of the seven - the kid, who previously had basically nothing to do - is himself transformed to be the motivating intelligence of that ship. And they will set out to battle a giant black "Shadow Egg" which is eating their sun - at this point, the Technopope's organization is still the main antagonist for the series. (I think that changes, and gets more cosmic, in the back half.)

The bafflegab is still silly here, but space-opera bafflegab is always silly, no matter what kind of space opera it is. This one is silly in a mystical way, but it's mostly grounded in the way this universe works; I can't complain too much about that. I still have trouble taking any of this seriously, but it's a famous series beloved by millions, so that could be a Me Problem, if you want to see it that way.

The Alliance of the Curious, #1: Sapiens by Philippe Riche

French creator Philippe Riche had a two-part series called Bad Break - as far as I can tell, it came out in France close to twenty years ago, and was translated into English in the mid-Teens, as part of Humanoids' expansion. Riche also did a sequel series around the same time, which was also brought into English by Humanoids.

I can't find any newer related books, but Humanoids - which I think was Riche's publisher in France, too - has been having some troubles lately, particularly the US outpost, so he might have pivoted to different projects with more stable partners. (Or maybe not - creative careers are odd and contingent, so he could be doing something different but vaguely related, like art-directing or making animation, right now.)

I did read the two Bad Break books last year - see my posts on the first and second one - and now I'm jumping into the sequel series, called The Alliance of the Curious. Riche seems to have carefully made this second go-round so he could expand on it easily with more stories - so, to my cynical mind, it's only to be expected that he wouldn't have the chance to do so.

This first Alliance of the Curious book is titled Sapiens. It picks up some time after Bad Break, or perhaps slightly changes the premise to facilitate more stories. Simon and Rebecca, two of the three main characters of Bad Break, are now in a relationship, and Simon is still working in vaguely the same junk industry: he now cleans out storage units and sells what he finds there, or acts as a middle-man between, on the one hand, people who have a bunch of random old junk and, on the other, potential buyers. It doesn't seem to be a lucrative career, but there's no sign that Rebecca is working, so I guess it pays for their lifestyle, such as it is. (Rebecca was a porn actress in the first series - in a vague way, since we only saw a few advertisements - so maybe she retired or maybe she's still working at the same thing or maybe she's shifted to acting/modeling work with more of her clothes on.) The third member of the original trio, Ernst-Lazare, is still doing the same thing: high-end dealer in cultural artifacts, mostly those that are or incorporate human remains. 

Meanwhile, we also see a secret society called the Order of Saint Louis, including three wild young blonde women known as the Cocaine Sisters, a man named Louis who is the previously-presumptive heir to a mysterious "throne," and a grumpy middle-aged functionary, Grégoire De Tours. An old woman has died, and she is of a "purer lineage" than Louis, so her son will inherit whatever this is.

That son, Griffon De Martel, is a white-haired man with some kind of mental problem, and we watch him stumble through his life as well - losing his apartment when his mother died, having all of his stuff sold to a junk dealer, falling into a group of homeless people.

Simon gets Griffon's stuff, most of which is worthless crap. But there is a jeweled skull, which he passes to Ernst-Lazare for help identifying and finding a market for. Meanwhile, the Cocaine Sisters start searching for Griffon - why them isn't as clear, but they obviously want to kill Griffon so their boy-toy Louis inherits whatever there is to inherit.

All this is set during a massive summer heat wave in Paris, mostly for atmosphere though it also allows Riche to put his cast in fewer clothes (or none, as we saw in Bad Break).

The secret of the De Martels comes out by the end of this book, and I won't give that away, but this is a Dan Brown-esque secret society thing, with hidden people with unexpected and frankly unrealistic connections to ancient history. In this book, there's mostly a bunch of running around, some shooting, and a whole lot of Griffon being confused and muddle-headed.

This one is all set-up; I expect the second book will have more action, explain the deal of the Order, and maybe even see our heroes make a little money from their findings. Although they didn't make a penny in Bad Break, so that could be a standard feature of Riche's work.

His art is still Euro-stylish, though his women all tend to look the same. Translators Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe put it all into idiomatic, clear English - it's a silly thriller plot, but that's the genre, not a complaint.  I tend to think this is slightly less engaging than Bad Break was - too much running about, with the Griffon scenes entirely separate from everything else - but it's in the same style, and I have hopes the back half will land the plane well.

Death in Trieste by Jason

If I say this book is more like Good Night, Hem than like Upside Dawn, does that help anyone place it? How about if I say that's not just because Athos makes a few appearances here?

(Athos is turning into the glue of Jason's later career, the character who turns up everywhere and has met everyone. See The Last Musketeer for his initial appearance, if you're confused. Not that will necessarily make you less confused, but it's a good place to start.)

Death in Trieste is a book with three long stories. They are not formally connected, though David Bowie - in one of his most glam '70s incarnations - is a character in two of them. They are somewhat typical Jason stories: laconic, allusive, but also deeply genre stories, told through gesture and implication, with blank-faced characters we're often supposed to recognize - usually as "the vampire" or "the secret agent" or Rasputin, but in one story here as "Annie Lennox circa 1985" and other pop-music figures. (Jason's drawing style makes the latter somewhat more difficult: they're all anthropomorphic animals with big blank eyes and fairly standard faces for their "type - I'm not sure who most of the musical characters in the story "Sweet Dreams" are meant to be.)

"The Magritte Affair" leads off. It's set in contemporary Paris, where a group of criminals place specially-made Magritte knockoffs in the homes of random people, which turns them into Surrealists, complete with black suits and bowler hats. (This oddly reminded me of the Monty Python sketch where an alien blancmange turns tennis players into Scotsmen.) The usual wisecracking detective duo - a man and a woman - track down the ringleader of the gang and foil the plot, just before Surrealism completely takes over the world.

The title story is in the middle, and it's a very Jasonian mix of genre tropes and characters - a bewildering mix of characters across Europe in the '20s (including a time-traveling David Bowie, Marlene Dietrich, Nosferatu, and the oracular skull of Rasputin) are involved in several intersecting plots mostly involving Dadaism, the theater, and a rampaging vampire. Athos shows up here, wandering through some of the later scenes, and influences events but has no dialogue.

Last is "Sweet Dreams," in which several New Wave bands are actually superheroes led by Avalon, a Dr. X-ish wheelchair-bound presumably-psychic. They battle mummies, living suits of armor, and other menaces, but are helpless against a giant meteor that has been diverted by unknown forces and will strike Earth with devastating force right after the end of the story. (A space mission by "Starman" - the same Bowie as in the previous story - was unsuccessful in shifting the meteor.)

Jason has done some other kinds of books over the past decade - the travelogue On the Camino, for example - but this book is firmly in the mainstream of his work. I find the joys and strengths of that work really clear in the reading, but difficult to nail down when writing about it. No one else is like Jason; he mixes high and low culture fluidly, telling what should be junky stories with the chill of high culture and a detachment that makes them fascinating and distinct. You might have to deeply enjoy both high and low culture to really appreciate Jason: for me, that's no handicap, but it might be for some readers.