Tagged: fantasy

Dungeon Fortnight #2

Hyacinthe was still basically an innocent at the end of the two albums collected in The Night Shirt, but the back half of the Early Years sub-series, collected in the English-language book Innocence Lost , definitively turns him into the older, cynical Keeper that we see in Dungeon Zenith. He starts off still as the somewhat deluded and not-particularly-effective nocturnal vigilante The Night Shirt, but keeps learning the world has greater and greater depths of suffering and venality and nastiness than he ever expected.

Even what he thought would be his triumphant moment — saving his love, the assassin Alexandra, and falling into bed with her — is sordid and twisted. This is the point in the long Dungeon series when that Gallic fatalistic philosophy really starts to kick in: that the world is horrible and will never be right, and that random events toss us around, no matter what we want.

That’s the story of the first book collected here — Une Jeunesse Qui S’Enfuit, as it was in French — which follows immediately on the stories in The Night Shirt. Hyacinthe is getting somewhat better at his vigilante activities, but he’s continually stymied at the difference between how he expects the world to be and how it actually is. The first few pages show that brutally: he can find and defeat criminals, but can’t return the money they stole to the random people it was stolen from, or even give it to an orphanage successfully. And then he goes to woo Alexandra again, becoming fully a part of her world in ways he never expected.

By the end of that story, Hyacinthe has become the man who will be the Keeper eventually: he’s finally had it beaten into him how Terra Amata really works, and he can make that world work for him. We see him get more and more confident as the story goes on, as more and more of his illusions are broken and he finally learns to take the cynical, horrible world as it comes.

It’s a tragedy, if you like. Hyacinthe is the only major character in all of the Dungeon books who ever tried to do good altruistically. And he only succeeds in any of his aims once he gives up on that forever.

The second book here is After the Rain (Apres La Pluie in French; it actually has an inter-title to give it an English title, which not all of the Dungeon books do), which takes place several years later. It’s set in the immediate aftermath of the Monstres story Heartbreaker, but, if we’re reading in this order, we don’t know that yet. We begin with Hyacinthe at the grave service of his wife, Elise, who was just assassinated.

The roles have switched: Alexandra is now chasing Hyacinthe, and she’s trying to stop the construction of the subway under the city for Hyacinthe’s old professor, Philip Cormor, as a way to get back Hyacinthe. That subway will make a lot of money for Hyacinthe and his partners, but it’s also likely to completely undermine Antipolis and destroy the city. But since when does anyone in Terra Amata think about problems tomorrow when they can get something they want today?

It’s not as simple as convincing Hyacinthe. It’s not even as simple as getting him, as the Night Shirt, to threaten all of the government officials. And Hyacinthe both wants Alexandra — or his idea of Alexandra — and isn’t ready to actually be with the real woman she is. So it all goes wrong: Hyacinthe is seriously injured and becomes suicidal. Work on the subway begins again. It all goes to hell.

In the end, Hyacinthe is in the Dungeon, surrounded by his monsters. It’s a happy ending, I suppose: his wife is dead, his city is destroyed, the Assassin’s Guild he ran shattered, but he’s back home and in a stronger position than ever.

Like the first volume, this is written by the creators of Dungeon, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim, with art by Christophe Blain. These are dark stories, taking place on rainy rooftops and dark rooms and caverns far beneath Antipolis, and Blain is very good at darkness and sudden violent action. He has the knack of drawing enough to show a whole world without drawing every last detail — some of the Dungeon artists to come will be more detailed, or less. Blain was a good choice for the stories set in crowded, noisy, messy Antipolis; others will do equally good work for different places and times.

I see I’m not talking about the humor much yet: these books are funny, and some sections even comic — but Early Years has a humor more sardonic than joking, and a tone like whistling past the graveyard.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

As far as I can tell, British cartoonist I.N.J. Culbard adapted four H.P. Lovecraft novellas into graphic novel form basically back-to-back in the early years of this decade, and then moved on to other projects. It’s taken me a bit longer to track down and read all of those books — At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward are the others — since I seem to have started reading them after he stopped making them.

I came last to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , which is thematically appropriate: it was in the middle of the Lovecraft/Culbard years, but it’s a clearly different kind of story from the other three, from a different end of Lovecraft’s work and with a very different view on life.

Most of Lovecraft’s work is in a negative, pessimistic mode: he was most commercially successful with stories of cosmic horror, where he sublimated his loathing of basically everyone in the world (including himself) and orchestrated an only somewhat informed sense of contemporary scientific developments into fever dreams of stolen bodies and coldly alien powers and inevitable shattering destructions of mind and body. That mode is what Lovecraft’s best known for, even now, and is where most of his best work lies — and a lot of problematic work as well, and a number of outright stinkers.

But Lovecraft also had a positive mode, which is traditionally associated with his early career. Those are mostly the “Dreamlands” stories, influenced by Lord Dunsany, in which characters who often resembled Lovecraft have adventures in a fantasy world safely separated from our own by the veil of sleep. “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is the longest and most fully worked out of those stories; it was written by 1927, a decade before Lovecraft’s death, but never published in his lifetime.

Culbard leans into the usual interpretation by having Randolph Carter, the protagonist, very strongly resemble the historical Lovecraft. This might only work for those of us familiar with his face, but isn’t that the majority of the audience for any Lovecraft adaptation?

Dream-Quest is an episodic story, here as it was in Lovecraft’s original, with Carter dreaming three times of a glorious golden city in the distance and then trying to find that city in the often-dangerous realms of the Dreamlands. He faces dire perils, mostly escaping by stealth or with the aid of friendly cats and of people he knew from Earth, transformed either in his dream or as their own dream-selves. The Dreamlands seem to be a real place, with solid geography, that can be mapped and must be traveled across. Most of this book takes place in one night, or so it seems to the sleeping Carter.

And, yes, the end is positive, or as positive as Lovecraft got, showing the one thing he was willing to acknowledge could bring happiness. (If you don’t know what that is, I certainly won’t spoil it for you here — read this book, or just read the novella.)

Culbard does just as good a job on this fantasy adventure as he did for the more horrific Lovecraft works — this book has a lot more gold and light than the others, but the palette is similarly limited on each page — Culbard doesn’t go for the garish eye-popping colors so common in “mainstream” comics. And he skillfully navigates the many talky scenes of this story, keeping them visually interesting.

This is the best of Lovecraft’s positive stories, well adapted here. Is that worth seeking out? Well, Lovecraft himself is more than a little problematic these days, particularly if you the reader belong to any of the many, many groups (women, blacks, Italians, New Yorkers, Jews, and so on) that he had strong and unpleasant opinions about. Those opinions don’t feature here, if that helps. I still think he’s a vital and deeply interesting writer, but I am a WASP with roots in the Northeast stretching back to colonial days…so I might be too close to him to be trusted.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

“There’s a world going on underground,” a great man once growl-sang, and Satania just is the book to explore that hidden underground world.

One might think the naked redhead at the center of the cover is Satania, but no — she’s Charlie (short for Charlotte), the teenage force behind an underground expedition to find her missing brother. Also in the group is the requisite old, crusty guide, Father Monsore, who was on the ill-fated prior expedition where Charlie’s brother Christopher disappeared. There are several others — the party starts out with about six people– but those are the ones to be concerned with.

Christopher had a crackpot theory that Neanderthals moved underground and therefore mutated into demon-looking humanoids who are the source of all worldwide stories of hell and its inhabitants. But these evolved Neanderthals are actually highly civilized, sexually free, and possessed of uniquely high technology that he will discover and share with the world. Now, Christopher deduced all of this — he has no evidence of any kind — and it seems that his book expounding his stupid theory was roundly panned out in the world. So, in a huff, he planned the expedition to prove his theories, heading into this cave somewhere in Europe to film the people he already knows everything about.

I think the reader is supposed to take Christopher’s theories seriously. But this, frankly, is impossible for anyone with a lick of sense and scientific knowledge — if he was right about anything, it could only be by pure happenstance. Luckily, it’s not necessary to believe in those nutty theories to enjoy Satania; he does not turn out to be entirely correct, though he did correctly guess that there’s much more going on in this massive subterranean cave system than surface-dwellers suspect.

So: Charlie, and Chistopher’s collaborator, and some other people somehow related to the crazy theory, are looking for him, in the cave system where a flash flood separated Christopher from the rest of his party months ago. And do they encounter their own flash flood practically as soon as the book begins?

Reader, of course they do.

They do not die in the flood, but their scrambles and running and propulsion by water leaves them somewhere they’ve never been before, with no way back. They set out to explore, in hopes of getting back to the surface. They have limited supplies and light, but, as with any self-respecting tale of underground worlds, they soon find edible and luminescent growing things to keep them going. (From that point on, everything is illuminated, and finding food not a serious issue.)

They find a lot more than that, of course: dangers aplenty, strange landscapes both made by sentients and shaped by nature, strange and dangerous creatures, allies and enemies, deadly heat and chilling cold. Satania turns out to be huge, and full of horror and wonders.

It does not, though, correspond closely to anyone’s image of Hell, even though several members of this party really really want it to, and this leads to certain unpleasant disagreements within the party. This is a story of hardships and stunning vistas, of a series of strange revelations, each stranger and more revelatory than the last. (But, to be clear: this is not a fantasy. They are not in Hell and everything they see should be roughly acceptable to physics, biology, and chemistry as we know them.)

Satania is a gorgeous book, as you might expect from the wife-and-husband art team credited as Kerascoet. The colors are exquisite, giving color to emotions and places, and the book contains a succession of amazing images, culminating in a fantastic double-page spread near the end. Even if this book hadn’t been translated from the French, I think it still would be worth “reading,” just for their work.

But it was translated (by Joe Johnson) from a script by Fabien Vehlmann, here just credited by his last name. He previously worked with Kerascoet on the stunning Beautiful Darkness , and I also really liked his script for the chilly SF graphic novel Last Days of an Immortal . So Satania is just a little disappointing: Christopher is a crank, and his crankishness sets in motion the whole plot, and there’s no way around that. The story is also more episodic — bad things happen, they flee, and have a moment of peace until the next episode starts — than the stronger Vehlmann books I’ve seen.

Not being as good as something amazing wonderful is not that much of a criticism, though: Vehlman has excellent dialogue here, making his very different people all come alive, and he particularly has a way with mania…perhaps he does realize what a crank Christopher is. Satania is an interesting, gorgeous, twisty journey through a vividly imagined world, by a set of world-class talents.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

We really don’t need any more origin stories. OK, maybe if it’s integrated — a quick flashback during something else — it’s not so bad. But, please, not a whole story just to show us how the guy we already know got to the place we’ve seen him. Boooo-ring.

Writers Kurt Busiek and Len Wein (along with artist Kelley Jones) work hard to keep Conan: Book of Thoth out of the Boring Zone, but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.

A) this is an origin story, and (even worse) one of a villain, so it’s all cackling laughter and evil triumphing.

Two) this is a Conan story in which Conan can’t appear at all, so we just get a couple hundred pages of neo-Howardian pre-historical squalor and woe.

Thoth-Amon is a major Conan villain — one of the few who doesn’t show up and get his head chopped off in the space of a short story, I mean, which is what “major Conan villain” means. And so, round about 2005, he got a comic-book series to explain Who He Is and How He Got That Way. And, well, it turns out he was a nasty street kid — battered by his father, to make it even more tedious and psychological — in some random Hyperborian Age city, who did various nasty things for four long issues to end up as High Priest of Set and secret ruler of an entire nation.

MUA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!

Book of Thoth is pretty much all one tone — slightly detached tsk-tsking at how horrible this guy named variously Thoth, Amon, and Thoth-Amon is, while still being excited at each new bit of nastiness. It’s really only for huge Conan fans, and I have no clear idea why it was on my shelf. (My best theory is that it came in one of the care packages of comics I got after my flood in 2011.) And it is one more signpost to show that we really don’t need more origin stories.

(By the way, I don’t know if Mssrs. Busiek, Wein and Jones knew this at the time, but if you google “Book of Thoth,” you get a whole lot of what are technically called “woo-woo” books about Atlanteans and energy beings and a tiny little bit of Egyptiana. Sometimes the obvious title makes your project hard to find.) 

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I didn’t remember Neil Gaiman’s story “Troll Bridge” well. In fact, if you’d asked me about it, I would have assumed some confusion on your part with Terry Pratchett’s short story “Troll Bridge,” and tried to lead you in that direction.

But story titles can’t be copyrighted, and even good friends can use the same ones without stress or strife. I’d forgotten it, but Gaiman did also write a story titled “Troll Bridge,” originally for the Datlow/Windling anthology Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and collected a number of times since then. And, since Gaiman has a huge audience in comics that might not be as familiar with his just-prose works — or, at least, there are publishers willing to bet that’s the case — a number of his short stories have been turning into short graphic novels from Dark Horse over the past few years.

Last year it was Troll Bridge ‘s turn, adapted and drawn by Colleen Doran.

I’m not sure short stories need to turn into graphic novels, but they’re about the right length — a twenty-page piece of prose can be a forty-eight-page graphic novel and fit comfortably into that size, without the usual Procrustean manipulations to fit the format. So, given that it’s possible, and anything both possible and likely profitable will happen, the only question left is: how well does this story work, translated into this new medium?

It works pretty well, actually. “Troll Bridge” is a story of episodes — a boy meets a troll under a bridge near his home, somewhere in then-rural England, and then other things happen over time — and that translates to comics just as well as it works in prose. The troll itself, as seen on the cover, is traditional, which is fine for this twisted-traditional story. And the boy looks much like Gaiman might have at the same age, which is of course the point, as in so many Gaiman stories. (He works from material based on his own life a lot more than I think he gets credit for.)

So this boy meets a troll, who wants to eat his life. The boy would rather his life not be eaten, so he makes a deal. And this is a fairy tale, so that deal comes out badly in the end — fairy tales only reward the heroes who are strong and true throughout, and have the luck to be born third. (And not even them, all of the time — fairy tales are one of our bloodiest types of story.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten whatever lesson “Troll Bridge” has to impart — unless it’s “keep away from bridges, because trolls lurk there and will eat you” — which may be why I keep forgetting it. Burt this is a good adaptation of that story, keeping the flavor of Gaiman’s narration and adding Doran’s pastorally-colored and carefully seen vision of his world. I’m still not 100% convinced this story needed to be adapted, but, if it was going to be anyway, this is definitely a successful version.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.