(click the links for art samples)

Green Manor (Vehlmann & Bodart, 2001) is a superb, darkly-hilarious historical fiction series, consisting of a delicious collection of short stories about murder and mayhem, in which the main participants are members of a famous gentleman’s club in 1800’s London. There’s a ‘Sherlockian’ kind of vibe running through these albums, altho in this case the stories mainly focus on the perpetrators and victims. One other fascinating aspect of these works is the butler’s framing story, who now resides in a mental ward, recounting all these stories to a visiting psychiatrist. In his deranged state is he making it all up, or did these fine gentlemen and pillars of society indeed sink to such sadistic depths through the years?

The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman, with Melchior & Oubrerie, 2014). This is a part one of a BD adaptation of the modern classic series His Dark Materials, set in a sci-fi / magical realism genre. In this world, humans have animal familiars (“daemons”) able to shape-shift until their host reaches adulthood, at which time “dust” begins to shut down that ability, a sort of counterpart to original sin in the biblical sense. The series’ protagonist is a young girl believed by many to have a great part to play in the world’s destiny, even as her estranged, obsessive parents are attempting to abolish the effects of said dust, each according to their own scientific approach. The unusually original story can be a little obscure to get in to, but makes comfortable sense about halfway through. Still, the adaptation isn’t amazing, and one might want to start with the source novel over the BD.

Centaurus (LEO / Rodolphe / Janjetov, 2018) is my favorite of LEO’s space series, right behind his excellent Trent books. The premise here is a “life ark” situation, in which the survivors of a dying Earth set out for a new world in the Alpha Centauri system. Against many odds they manage to reach the target and send out a reconnaissance crew. Unfortunately, they swifly lose communication, and what’s more, discover to their shock that someone or something has tampered with the ship’s navigation system, and they are *not* in fact at the destination planet. What’s more, it’s discovered that the same intruder presence mated with some of the colonists two decades earlier, producing a generation of children with various paranormal powers, one of whom is a member of the ground crew(!) Meanwhile on the ground, the landing party explores the surface, occasionally struggling to survive dangerous wildlife, even as they’re dumbfounded to discover what seem to be human ruins. Things only get more intense from there, as they struggle to understand who or what is responsible for the mission going sideways. As usual, LEO’s characters are a bit on the ‘mannered’ side, as if this was all something of a stage production, but the excellent story more than makes up for that quibble. Indeed, there’s a tangle of mysteries in this work, some interesting personal dynamics, all set against a dire survival situation, that makes this series shine.

Hasib & the Queen of Serpents (David B., 2015) - a wondrous adaptation of one of the lesser-known Scheherazade stories from One Thousand and One Nights. We begin with Hasib, son of a sage, struggling to make a career for himself. He eventually finds work as a woodcutter, only to be betrayed by his colleagues, trapped in a cave and left for dead. It’s from there that we embark on a sinuous, nested group of tales, many of them involving the terrifying Queen of the Serpents, a mostly benevolent being whose main work involves torturing the dead in hell(!) Eventually the tale winds back to Hasib, who escapes with the Queen’s aid, and must make his way through a series of betrayals to save his dying ruler. With all that said, the stories aren’t so much the main focus as is the wonderful art, framing of words and images, and storytelling process. I found this work almost beyond rational judgement, rather something to absorb more than “read.” It has something of a children’s storybook quality, but speaks to some mythological, emotional, and archetypical realities, if that makes sense.

Islandia (Marc Védrines, 2007) is a 3-book series set in 17th-century Iceland, and wow, was it tough to review(!) Did Islandia work as a concept, and would I recommend it? Yes and yes, but with some qualifications I’ll get in to later. Also worth noting is that the series may have special relevance for Icelandic folks, and perhaps even Christians who enjoy a certain Old Testament dynamic, in which God takes an active hand in the proceedings. Getting to the story, a fresh-faced French lad has recurring visions of strange symbols and specific places that he believes may be related to Iceland, and stows away on his dad’s fishing boat in hopes of making his way there. Things don’t go smoothly for him, however. He’s continually mistrusted and even physically attacked, forced to flee from one place to another before finally reaching what seems to be the specific place he had visions of. Whilst there, he meets a sorcery-practicing woman who helps him understand what it all means, and who he really is, before they’re caught by the local authorities, placed at the stake, and burnt alive! That sums up the first two volumes, and from there we go on an intense whirlwind of changing ‘vessel-characters’ (I don’t want to give too much away), plus an important new character, who helps our antihero understand his terrible, traumatic past, the very one which sent him down this sorcerous path, hounded perpetually by God’s minions. Finally, many years later, our character’s existential crisis is resolved, and as a bonus, we even get an interesting look in to major events of Icelandic history, which I absolutely was not expecting.

My impressions are like this-- I found the lead character to be unusually sympathetic, which made it truly unsettling to see how poorly life treated the young lad throughout the story. Now yes, it did make sense in later context, but still… wow. Regardless, I suppose that this is really a tale about humanism and perhaps ‘thwarted love turned to generalised hate,’ so to speak. Major credit here to writer-artist Védrines, who does a noteworthy job portraying the historical settings and character of 17th-century Icelandic folk. Although to be honest? It wasn’t entirely flattering. That is-- everything was permeated by a wretched, gloomy commonness of paranoid superstition, leading to much pointless blame, death and tragedy for the simple people of the time. Still, to be fair, I suppose it was a relatively accurate portrayal. *shudder*

In the end, apart from the Icelandic settings, I almost felt like the way we conduct ourselves and treat each other as humans was the main theme of the series. Overall, this was a sharply unique tale, the like of which I doubt I’ll ever see again.