Fabien VehlmannRecensioni

El mundo ya no es el mismo, ni tampoco aquellos que han sobrevivido. Aquí vivir es arriesgarlo todo…Ellos están SOLOS.

En el volumen 6 de la serie, Saúl está preocupado: no puede usar sus poderes a voluntad y algunos miembros del Consejo empiezan a preguntarse si realmente es el Elegido del Bien y su legítimo emperador. Las tensiones se disparan en Neosalem por las decisiones crueles que va tomando y, para reforzar su poder, organiza unos juegos, todavía más intensos que los anteriores, en los que Leïla participa, armada solo con un cuchillo. Con la ayuda de unos pocos amigos que le han permanecido leales, provocará una verdadera revolución entre los esclavos.

What a weird and wonderful comic. This darkly comic fairy tale brings to life the unsettling world of childhood imagination, reminding us that the whimsical and the disturbing are two sides of the same coin. Here are childlike sprites whose play inevitably ends in gruesome violence, and an enchanted woodland populated by charming mice in tailcoats but also predators and grubs. And of course, there's a (somewhat understated) darkness at the center of this book—the sprites have tumbled out into reality because the young girl who dreamed them up lies dead in the woods.

I feel like many comics of this kind excel at atmosphere but fall short on plot, but Beautiful Darkness acquits itself well on both counts, with a pleasing, if unsettling, fairy tale arc. And the artwork is perfect—vivid, expressive, and with plenty of nods to Victorian children's book illustrators.

Recommended to fans of gothic comics and weird fantasy, and a readalike for Emily Carroll's Through the Woods.

Wow, this is one of the weirdest books I remember reading. Deeply creepy and macabre (it's not for the squeamish), but beautiful with it. A little of The Gashlycrumb Tinies mixed with Lord of the Flies, depicted in a fairy-tale pallet. But that still doesn't give an adequate sense of what to expect. At heart, it's a slightly meandering story of how children behave in a group, with the kindnesses and loyalties and cruelties and jealousies that involved, with plenty of dark and deadly twists along the way. And the children are weird, tiny forest folk. I'm missing one of the most singular things of the book on purpose (and which you may well already know), because it actually has little to do with the plot, and also shapes expectations of the book so much that I feel like it is misleading to mention it. But you probably already know.

A gorgeously illustrated book, this tale wraps around and circles both its characters and its readers. It's easy to fall into and devour in one sitting, and the creepy moments are so incredibly tantalizing, it's hard for a horror-lover like me not to fall in love with this book. All that said, I admit I have a hard time slowing down enough to really focus on the way graphic novels tell so much story through illustrations vs words, and require readers to put together so many pieces to connect the dots. Here, I lost the story thread a few times, and I suspect this is one of those books that may require a few reads in order for everything to be clear. I do wish it had been a bit clearer, in how everything fell together, but the book is such an experience and has such wonderful art, it's hard to complain.

I suspect I'll wander through this one again in the near future and potentially update my review then.

Una qualche assonanza con Saki.

Le tigri
dell'ira sono
più sagge dei
cavalli del-
l'istruzione.
(William Blake, pagina 114)

Didn't really like the art so much (not bad, though) but excellent story.

Didn't really like the art so much (not bad, though) but excellent story.

Take some elixir of THC, pour yourself a drink, put maybe a Bach cantata on low, find a comfortable chair, turn on a good reading lamp, open the book -- and sink, slide into a very sweet, very dark fantasy. Aurora will guide you. She won't lose you; at least not right away.

Graphic Novel BookClub October:

Ho-lee-crap. This book is weird, dark and crazy. My eyebrows kept crawling into my hairline the whole time. It's like Lord of Flies meets Heart of Darkness, mixed in with some foreign, snowy, ice land horror story I haven't found yet. I remembering being truly confused about caring in the first two-three pages, until that last page of the intro, when I suddenly went "....oh...uh....okay."

Then the tiny horrific thing started popping up but being normal. Not pushed out or changed. Not highlighted by the writing or the characters. There are still two pages of truly, awe-inspiring art work in the book (when the girl is waking up in the leaves, and when the man is at his work bench in the cabin), which makes it clear the artist is capable of stunning work and thus the art of this tale is a purposeful choice, though I am still uncertain to why at all.

Mostly I walk away from this one with a bizarre face (and a gratefulness that we were eating boozy ice cream while meeting over it).

Even as a fan of allegorical, graphic, and dark lit generally, I can't get behind this book. Too disturbing for me... the only redeeming part is that the art really is lovely, if you can get past the rest.

My review of a synopsis of all 5 volumes can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/8iwpMWoIaBc

Enjoy!

Ah our fellow traveler is helping an old friend find a beast that is tearing apart the villages and villagers. Great artwork and good story!

So far my favorite one. The marquis goes to the sea and finds a ship full of dead people. Now the people on his boat start getting sick and dying. Just wonderful story and art.

In this story Jean-Baptiste travels to a place where women are being violently murdered. I did figure out the killer in this one! Another great story with good graphics... On to the next!

A man goes to an island to tutor a boy. What he stumbles on is anything but normal. Crazy old man, dead children. Stunning tale, nice and creepy. Graphics are good.

This book has been like no other I have read. The title is a perfect pair of words to describe the intent of the author and illustrator, leaving me to feel like I am instead reading a growing nightmare. I wish there was more, even though the story ended well enough. There are a few ambiguities left throughout, and I cling to those as meaning some characters have escaped and live a better fate than the rest. Definitely recommend for those who like a darker twist to their stories/visuals!

Alerte aux Zorkons
La Face Cachée du Z
Dans les Griffes de la Vipère
Le Groom de Sniper Alley

This is a horror graphic novel with the art style of a children's book. It's about a community of inch-tall people who suddenly lose their home in the forest. Young, bright-eyed Aurora does her best to help everyone adapt and find new homes. But will everyone's (and nature's) casual cruelty wear her down?

The art is striking and the horror is morbid. But the book is too brief and brisk for me to get emotionally invested. I also found the action hard to follow, which is a problem I often have with comic books.½

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3825488.html

Third and final volume of the award-winning bande dessinée series, of which I very much enjoyed volume 1 and volume 2. We start a year on from previous events, with the reappearance of the mysterious Umo, an enigmatic huge extraterrestrial entity, after it was banished at the end of the last volume, and its incursion into mainland France, throwing the government of President Fillon into disarray and bringing about new and nasty alliances between the forces of state coercion and the underworld, while our protagonist Tayeb mobilises the George Sand, a giant killer robot, to try and save the day. To be honest, I was not convinced that Vehlmann and De Bonneval successfully kept all the plates spinning in their convoluted plot, though they ask a lot of interesting questions. But the art by Tanquerelle and Blanchard is very good, and the first volume of the trilogy set a very high bar which the other two did not quite reach.½

The only thing stopping me from rating Beautiful Darkness five stars is how grossed out I was at some of the scenes. I know that that's more of a personal issue than a story one, but when some scenes leave me wanting to look away... well, they were depicted beautifully but it was just too much (Like one of the triplets [or whatever] sneaking into the bird's nest to try to get fed and having her face torn apart by the well-meaning mama bird; the weird girl eating the maggots and eventually the decaying body of the human girl; the girl who rubbed up against poison ivy or whatever, Aurora gouging out the mouse's eyes [something that I've always been sensitive too]...)
EDIT 2020: I changed the rating to 5 stars because sometimes that terrible bird scene will randomly pop into my head and freak me out all over again.

The story - that some beautiful fairytale creatures somehow get transported to our world and struggle to survive - is cliche, but the way that Vehlmann creates nuance (some mushrooms are poisonous and kill people when they eat them; the hunger that plagues everyone and the lengths they'll go to satisfy it; the selfishness and self-absorption of everybody) is what elevates it. That characters are beautiful (Aurora and Zelfie) and cute (Plim and the others) and contrast really well with the decaying corpse of the little girl. Aurora's journey, from being the altruistic capable leader to a disillusioned loner is realistic and relatable, and her decision to lead the others into the stove at the end (and after what happened to Zoe, I guess... I wish there was more elaboration on that) was heartbreaking, tense, and inevitable.

If you've seen Seven Psychopaths, then you're well-primed for this slight comic, by the author of the screenplay and Jason, the famously laconic and unexpected graphic novelist.

And while slight, 100,000 Graves packs a punch. Gwenny finds a treasure map in a bottle and realizes it's the same one her father found and followed years ago, never to return. Having been left alone with her (crazy?) mother, Gwenny hires a band of pirates and bluffs her way into one of them swearing to protect her.

Of course, in a twist that should be expected from the two creators but still hits, the island is revealed as an executioner's training academy, and anyone who arrives is found guilty and used as practice dummies. Gwenny's protector, mired in quicksand, begs to be left behind. Gwenny then reveals she never knew his secret, and was blackmailing him over nothing. The panels after he tells her to leave, in which he realizes his quickly approaching and lonely death, are heart-wrenching and true. How many of us have pushed someone away and immediately regretted it?

Gwenny's father, it turns out, never made his way to the island and instead used his leaving as a chance to create a new life, leaving his wife and daughter behind. When Gwenny confronts him, there is no shouting or crying: she calmly confronts him and leaves. She is a confident, self-possessed girl, and now that this mystery is solved she can move on.

A beautiful, unexpected, and sparse novella.

Not at all what I expected - somehow I got the impression that it was by the same team which did Beautiful Darkness, a graphic novel that still unsettles me to this day when I find myself thinking about it. Literally the scene of the little triplet sneaking into the bird's nest to be fed has stuck with me for years and probably will continue to. Thus, I came into this reading with some trepidation, expecting beautiful and disturbing visuals.

And while that's what I got, the tone is completely different. Beautiful Darkness read as nihilistic, shocking, brutal, and uncompromising. Satania, by contrast, is about madness and determination. Disturbing things happen, yes, but Charlie doesn't care. She and the priest continue on regardless. They have no choice.

The visuals truly shine, with frequent full-page spreads and incredible vistas. Nothing is graphic or over the top.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3749388.html

I read the first volume in this series a couple of months ago, and enjoyed it; the second keeps up the pace, with a well-realised set of characters stealing a giant nuclear-powered battle robot from its resting place in Bombay and bringing it towards its destiny in the Algerian desert; meanwhile the baby born at the end of the previous volume has a very mysterious mark on its forehead which seems linked with the mysterious intrusion into our reality from another world. This volume is a little middle book-y as we travel from start to conclusion of the trilogy (in a giant killer robot floating westward over the Indian Ocean), but the pace is kept up very well. The third and final volume comes out next month, and I'm looking forward to it.