So Something Finally Happens, and it’s really well-written and well-handled, and surprisingly affecting.

Of course, it happens hundreds of miles away from the zoo.

I’m prepared to accept that I am denser than the average bear — even if that average bear happens to be held captive by a teenage sexpot who likes to sleep on his stomach — but this series baffles me. There may be some massive, brilliant, underlying metaphor at work here. I suspect there isn’t, and the writer had a Generic People Caught Up In War story, the artist really wanted to draw a zoo, and the zoo was a convenient hook to hang the Generic War Story on. I could, again, be wrong.

I’m going to re-read this series in more depth for a full review in the future, at which point I’ll try to come up with some sort of compelling reason for, well, the zoo. Gorgeous as always, and the writing is perfectly fine, but the rich promise of this series’ premise leaves me blinking heavy-lidded at the eventual execution.

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Things pick up — sort of — in the second volume of Zoo, with Frank’s art continuing to astonish and the story kinda-sorta solidifying into something resembling a plot. Well, a bit: by the end of the book, the status quo actually changes.

Maybe I’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle, and the whole point here is that it’s supposed to be a slice-of-life book, bereft of any story of particular consequence… but if so, why set it in a fantastical zoo, on the cusp of a world war? I understand mood pieces, and I understand plot-charged narrative, but this is a sort of in-between fugue, where there are all the elements for a plot out there, but the plot never seems to penetrate the heavy mist that hovers around the book. It’s like there’s a dynamic, tense, tragic story to be told about this beautiful and doomed (I’m assuming) enterprise, but somebody snuck in overnight and pumped the place full of ether, and everyone’s just kind of dopily wandering around an extravagant set.

This isn’t entirely fair — there is a strong thread developing in the character’s sub-plots, circling around the broad themes of ideals and compromise, and there is some forward motion — Célestin, the owner of the Zoo, has to decide whether to stay in his (relatively) comfortable settings or to do what he can as a healer in times of war, and Buggy (and Manon) have to confront the idea of selling their cherished art to keep the Zoo afloat — but it’s glacial, and the grinding pace of the story doesn’t seem to do justice to the gorgeous setting. Speaking of gorgeous, the art continues in its unabashed brilliance:

Incidentally, I apologize for scan quality — old scanner, one man working alone, and all that. Hang on — I don’t apologize. Buy the dang book. It looks much better than these scans do.

There’s a bit of a build towards something conclusive in Volume 3, but I’m not sure what that will entail.

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The first book of a three-volume series about a zoo in Normandy in the days leading up to World War II. Simply spectacular art — take a look.

I can see what the writer is aiming for, I think — the off-kilter story of an unconventional “family” in a charming and magical setting — but there are a lot of false notes in the first volume. I can’t tell if these are intentional plot points that will be followed up in future volumes, something that escapes me due to the cultural divide, or just plain weird writing, but the two most egregious examples in the first volume are the opening: 16 pages of nearly worldless story that focuses on men with beards in what seems to be Russia, and the Only Blond Man and the Only Blonde Woman — and their pet bear (??) get in what seems to be a completely unprovoked fight with the rest of the village and the woman’s nose gets knocked off by a rifle butt (!!). All of this is “narrated” by a children’s story about a she-wolf getting eaten by dogs and how the nose is where your soul is kept. Huh? That, and a queasy sexual relationship between a character that is obviously presented as a young, young girl (she acts more or less like a 12-year-old, albeit a very well-developed one) and an obviously adult character, really leaves me scratching my head about some of the writing choices; this all happens in a kind of slack atmosphere that has me wondering where exactly all this is headed. There’s no “plot,” per se, in terms of dynamic forces in motion: the feeling of the book is basically “hey here are our characters and a bunch of stuff happens.”

That being said, Zoo is worth a look — the art is gorgeous, and the characters are engaging, even while the plot drifts along more or less aimlessly toward an ending that hints that — perhaps — something of consequence might happen in the second volume.

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Another bit of catch-up… this is currently out in English translation from Archia Studios, and was pointed out by somebody in the podcast forums as being excellent. I’m a bit disturbed by the translation — “Long Feu,” the title of the first volume, was translated as “Long Fire,” which totally misses the play on words in the French, where “Long Feu” actually means missing your mark; a misfire or a failed fuse (called “hang fire” in military circles). “Long Fire” doesn’t mean, well, anything, really. The first six pages in the Archia preview are workmanlike, but lack some of the crackle of the French. Bizarrely, it seems that the artist is the person who translated the book, too.

This sort of thing really makes me worry about the experiences that English-language readers are having when they read these in translation. It’s never too late to learn a second language, folks! And Le Tueur is a good place to start — it’s plot-heavy but text-light, so second-language speakers should be able to keep up with the picture-story and assimilate French from the world balloons.

Ahem. Sorry ’bout the tangent.

The edition I picked up was an offer I couldn’t refuse: the first three books, bound in a slightly undersized hardcover, for about CAD$30.

You can’t see it on my scan, but the killer on the cover is embossed, which makes for a very cool cover when you see it at an angle.

Pitch-perfect, both in writing and art. In terms of modern noir, and in contrast to my weekend’s other read, Blacksad, this is a much better-balanced effort: the art doesn’t have nearly as much flash as Blacksad, but Jacamon is confident, intelligent, and draws to serve the story. Matz’s script is amazing, too, and I’m going to have to seek out his Plomb dans la tête now just to see more of his work.

Jacamon brings to mind some perfect distillation of Mark Hempel and Dean Ormston (particularly Hempel’s Breathtaker and Ormston’s The Eaters): spare lines, but absolutely nothing out of place. The Killer (he has no name) is a perfect cipher and yet still personable and sympathetic in Jacamon’s skilled hands — a feat that would be equally impossible without Matz’s script. What makes Matz’s killer really shine is a combination of his utter and complete lack of apology for his work, and the lack of glamour that Matz brings to his “profession.” This is a workaday killer, and doesn’t fly the bad-childhood or no-women-no-kids flags that generally cripple most protagonist assassins into being cuddly compromises for mass consumption: he’s a dull, dedicated, and somehow engaging man who approaches his work like an electrician might. Physically average (and yet, in one surrender to trope, somehow able to attract absolutely gorgeous women to him constantly), not so great in a hand-to-hand fight, and amazingly mundane in his goals (a life plan that consists of (a) make lots of money, then (b) retire to Venezuela). And the plot doesn’t nice him up to keep our attention, and yet keeps our attention anyway, thanks to a fast-moving storyline with lots of little twists and relentless clarity.

The English version is apparently selling well, and there’s even film chatter in the works. Good on Jacamon and Matz — there’s nothing groundbreaking about The Killer, but compared to a lot of the windier, bad-guy-but-really-just-misunderstood “hardboiled” books on the market, it’s refreshing to see a bare-bones approach that fires on all cylinders.

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This, and today’s other capsule review (Le Tueur) are more catch-up than anything: not new series, but remarkable ones that are also available in English. First up: Blacksad.

I am not a furry fan, and I’m not a noir-warmed-over fan (although I am fond of innovative noir spins, like Brick and The Big Lebowski). But I’ve heard so much great stuff about Blacksad from so many quarters that — despite the Emo name and obvious furry inclinations — I decided to pick it up. And how can you not fall in love with art like this?

Or this gorgeous noir staple, the fight in the fog?

Beautiful book.

Perfectly mundane writing.

It’s boilerplate noir, with nothing really distinctive about it, and that — especially given the truly breathtaking art — is a letdown. This may be something that gets rectified in later volumes, but other than a couple of puns and the fact that animals of the same family tree tend to hang out together, there’s nothing particularly “animal-y” about the characters in play. It seems like a bit of a loss to go through all the effort of drawing amazing animal heads on essentially human bodies, but then follow that by making them all act exactly like humans with the occasional animal tic. Taking the above fog-fight scene as an example: does that lizard “see” with his tongue like regular lizards? Or is he basically a human thug with a really lizardy head? There don’t seem to be any “mixed species” animals in the book, but obvious cross-species couples, so what happens if a poodle-man gets an ape-woman pregnant? Why are elephant-men and mice-men the same size? Where are the insect people, the shellfish people, the bacteria people, etc.? This, by the way, is why I don’t do so well with furries in general. It’s a nice visual, but doesn’t at all work once you get past the surface, and evidently the author didn’t really want to work at gettting under the surface of the world beyond it being a Bogart movie with funny-shaped heads. As an aside, the dismaying trend of casual misogyny that seems to plague noir knock-offs, where women are virgins, vixens, victims or vultures — is in full effect, too, which seems a shame: if you’re going to go through the effort to turn every player in the book into an animal, why not mess with the tired old gender roles a bit too?

But gorgeous. Man oh man. Just beautiful. I’ll be picking up the next two volumes, and probably the fourth when it comes out, just to admire that amazing artwork.

The first two books, by the way, are available in English. Unfortunately, the English-language publisher, Ibooks, has apparently gone bankrupt. Volumes 1 and 2 of Blacksad are out in translation but consequently out of print, so you’ll have to hit eBay or used sites to find ‘em. This also leaves the translation of #3 up in the air, but that might be a project for this site in the future, when time allows.

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The fourth (and last, damn it) volume of Larcenet’s absolutely fantastic series (the first two volumes are available in English as “Ordinary Victories” from NBM, which is a better title translation than I would have thought of) proves that the law of diminishing returns does not apply to Combat Ordinaire.

Each book is better than the last by a measure, as protagonist/narrator Marco continues to personally grow (paralleled now by the growth of his child). Larcenet took some flak, apparently, for moving into a less “Gaston LaGaffe” style of art with Vol. 3, and I’ll have to review the earlier ones to be sure, but I think he’s hybridized a bit with Planter des clous. The sketchier style is definitely present, but there’s a more playful feeling to the drawing, especially when Larcenet turns his attention to Marco’s daugher Maude. 

 
Larcenet’s brilliant — he’s deft at manipulating his art style to evoke the right emotion at the right moment, but without beating you over the head with it. Maude is seen through a colourful childhood-cartoony filter, but ruminations on how the ever-neurotic Marco is dealing with parenthood are juxtaposed with sober still-lifes of childhood artifacts. The death of the steel mill that has been a recurring theme in the series anchors the whole book, and Larcenet handles those threads with an inky style and somber colours that make you feel the winding-down of hundreds of lives at once. I kept getting reminded of the second season of The Wire, and it’s incredible to me that one evokes the other so clearly; staggeringly well-realized portraits of the death of the middle class, separated by an ocean and a language but united in their sense of nostalgia, loss and fading dignity.

Also like The Wire,  this is not something to immerse yourself in if you’re looking for a cheap pick-me-up. Larcenet (generally through Maude) inserts the odd moment of hope and delight, but definitely does not leave you anything close to what one might call “chipper.”

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Terra Inferno 1: La Montagne Qui Rêve

Writing: Cristiano Fighera / Art: Francesco Biagini
August 2007

Taking place “many years” after a Cthulian presence appears in the middle of London in 1924, Terra Inferno is the first part of a Soleil: Mondes Futurs series. High weirdness with an odd strain of restraint running through it, it follows the passage of the giant Seth, his partner Nadia, and friend-of-convenience, the John-Constantine-riffing magician Osman Spare (and his cowardly student/servant Ray) as they look for hidden truths inside an ocean liner. The trick is that the ocean liner is embedded in the body of the slumbering behemoth — the “dreaming mountain” of the title, which transformed London, and apparently the planet, into a mix of people and half-human monsters when it breached our reality in 1924. The writing is more than decent, but flies on strength of concept more than richness of character (I have a feeling that now that the premise has been established, we’ll be seeing more depth of character in the second volume). There’s a touch of genius to the raw weirdness, though, and Spare looks like he’s going to be a much more interesting (and amoral) character than his progenitor Constantine. The art is brilliantly strange; all raw meat and teeth on the “monsters,” the palette done entirely in pink-reds, pale blues, and sickly beige, giving the whole thing an aura of unease and illness that makes the High Adventure plot much creepier than it would be with a less astute artist.

Judging from their site (which includes a fair bit of Terra Inferno artwork) the author and artist are Italian; the work is translated by Axelle Klein but I’m not sure if it’s been published in Italian.

Part one of three, according to the Italian site. Worthwhile: I’m looking forward to the next installment.

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One of the things this site will feature is capsule summaries of newly released material, either incomplete series (reviews will tend to focus on completed bédé or story arcs in long-running series) or one-offs that we won’t have time to give the full review treatment.

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