Some thoughts on the new version of Dungeon: Twilight from NBM

I've said it before: Dungeon (or Donjon, in the original French) is my all-time favorite comics series. For the uninitiated, it's masterminded by L'Association founders Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar. Trondheim and Sfar combined to create a cartoony, anthropomorphic character design style that's a little grittier than Trondheim's usual style and a little more stylized than Sfar's. The central characters are an idiotic duck named Herbert and a philosophical but brutal strongman named Marvin. The genre is high fantasy, using every trope and trick in the book with regard to quests, epic adventures, spells, wizards, monsters, treasure, etc. you can imagine. What makes the series special is that it's simultaneously an irreverent send-up of all of these tropes and a loving tribute to them. It's akin to the most ridiculous D&D campaign imaginable with ridiculous characters who nonetheless have a job to do. 

In French comics, serialization is in the form of approximately 48-page albums. The Dungeon series began with volume one of the Zenith storyline, introducing Herbert and Marvin and featuring the titular dungeon at the height of its success. As Trondheim and Sfar continued along, they asked: what if we skipped ahead to volume 101 of the series? What would be happening then? The result is the Dungeon: Twilight series of albums, where Herbert is the all-powerful and evil Grand Khan and Marvin is the Dust King and wishes only to die. The first volume of this series is #101! Then they imagined: what would the story be like if they went back in time to the beginning of the Dungeon, focusing on the original wizard master and where he came from? That would be Dungeon: The Early Years, featuring Hyacinth, who would become the creator of the Dungeon and its tower, and that volume started off at -99 and counted its way up to 1! Of course, neither artist intends to produce all of the volumes. They did ten volumes of Zenith, six volumes of Early Years (which skipped around, going from -99 to -97 and then to -84, -83, and -81. In Twilight, it goes from 101 - 106, and then 111 and 112. To date, 25 volumes relating to this storyline have been published, as well as another 28 volumes telling stories of side characters, early side stories featuring Herbert and Marvin, more stories of the far future and past, and other oddities. That's over 2500 pages of comics, most drawn by artists other than Trondheim, but that's a crazy level of output for one world!

This is a densely-plotted series of interconnected epics with dozens of characters, but one that's also easy to follow because it mostly focuses on a few key ones in each set of stories. Translating Trondheim's comics has always been somewhat thorny, because American audiences don't always take to his funny animal style of art and dry sense of humor. NBM, who's been translating European comics for well over forty years, tried a few different ways of translating these comics. First, they tried a black & white (grayscaled) version of this in comic book form, which no one much liked. Second, they started combining two volumes at a time in a smaller, almost digest-sized form. This was at least in full color, but the frequently intricate art was shrunk so much that it was hard to read, especially since they're also pretty wordy. 

At last, however, NBM has made the wise choice of reprinting the series again, this time at something approaching the original scale. Even better, they're packing four albums into one collection at a time, making them highly dense 200-page volumes. I just read the first collection for Twilight, and the result was a version that simply breathes better. Trondheim drew the first half of this volume, and much of his art has always depended on negative space: pauses, vistas, quiet moments that the art emphasizes. Printing it at the correct size helps this, and also helps when there's a lot of dialogue. 

And with a new character, a rabbit named Marvin the Red, there's a lot of chattiness. This Marvin eventually befriends the original Marvin, much to the latter's chagrin, since he's done with fighting and everything except going to the dragon burial grounds and dying. However, that's not in the cards for him, so he confronts his old friend Herbert. In Zenith, Herbert acquired a legendary sword that was a pain in the ass, and it talked about sending him on a quest for other legendary objects. In Twilight, we learn that he completed the quest, but at great cost: he took all of their evil into himself and became the tyrannical Grand Khan. Marvin was tired of living after his own years of battle, tearing out his eyes rather than see his own children because of religious customs. 

Then Trondheim and Sfar make the bold move of inflicting doomsday on his characters, as they now have to hop from island to island. Sfar is the artist for the first three chapters, the only ones he drew for any of the series. The husband and wife team of Kerascoet handle the art duties on the last chapter, and it's not quite as good as the ideal version of the characters that Sfar draws. There's a little too much texture in the line art, a little too much detail, and it's distracting at times. However, once one settles into their style, the story is flexible enough to adjust to this change and there are fewer distractions. 

Marvin the Red is the breakout superstar of this story. He's mean, stupid, and violent. He's also loving and loyal. He does anything he can to protect the Dust King and his little bat friend. He's absolutely fearless in the face of great danger. He's also a lover and a cad, romancing several women at once. Of course, he has no guile or skill, and he gets taken advantage of as much as he's just trying to get into their pants, but it's one of the funniest things about Marvin. He's a wonderful send-up of Conan-like barbarian characters. 

The ideal world would see each volume published separately, in English, with precisely the same coloring and line resolution. This collection doesn't have that. Sometimes, the resolution looks a bit wobbly. All that said, this is still a vast improvement over past attempts, and my hope is that sales are brisk enough to give the same treatment not just to Dungeon, but to other Trondheim books. Fantagraphics only published one volume of Ralph Azham before Kim Thompson died, and this kind of series seems ideal for NBM to publish if they get the rights. 

Dungeon is bawdy, bloody, raucous, contemplative, tragic, and triumphant. It's a series of interlocking storytelling puzzles in the tradition of Carl Barks. It's a love letter to fantasy fiction and even roleplaying games. It's a devastating satire of all of these things, all at the same time. Any fan of fantasy comics or fiction at any level will enjoy both its reverence and irreverence, often on the same page or even the same panel. NBM has published an omnibus for Twilight, Zenith, and Early Years. Hopefully, they will finish those out and then turn to Dungeon: Monsters, Dungeon: Parade, and untranslated work like Dungeon: Antipodes. 

NBM: Satania, by Kerascoet & Fabien Vehlmann

With regard to the French husband-wife creative team Kerascoet (Marie Pommepuy & Sebastien Cosset), their subject matter seems to be uniformly grim and perverse whether they're working with writing collaborators Hubert or Fabien Vehlmann. In their latest release in English, Satania, they are back with Vehlmann after their supremely creepy collaboration, Beautiful Darkness. It's not just that their comics are filled with visceral and frequently unsettling violence; in many of their comics, each page is a fight for basic survival for each of the characters, and the odds are stacked against them. Each of their books also tends to center around a quasi-innocent young woman who turns out to be tough as nails, as she fends off the dangers of her environment as well as a long line of men who threaten them sexually. The other commonality is that Kerascoet's command of color produces pure eye candy. Their line is cartoony, almost ranging into classic Gallic bigfoot style. That said, it's color that dominates every page, sometimes almost entirely overwhelming line.

 

Satania begins with two pages of near-darkness underground, until we meet a spelunking priest whose goal was to find a party that foolishly set out in dangerous caves. That party includes a scientist named Lavergne and the sister of an explorer who had disappeared in the caves. She's a redhead nicknamed Charlie, and she's the prototypical spunky Kerascoet hero who's in way over her head but finds a way to persist. She's in search of her brother, who has theorized that hell is a real place, only it has a scientific explanation: an offshoot of humanity found a way to live deep in the bowels of the earth. After a flood comes that wipes out half the party and takes away most of their supplies, the result is a story that's part Jules Verne's A Journey To The Center Of The Earth and part Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A key character in the book is a hallucination: Charlie and Christopher's mother. As it turns out, she claimed to have been raped by a demon, which led Christopher to his wild theories about an underground civilization of creatures that looked like demons. Charlie knew that the truth was far more prosaic (a drunk, red-headed farmer at a party), but it turned out that Christopher accidentally stumbled on the truth. The party, whose composition with a doubting priest and a scientist burning with belief made it a walking but highly unusual debate, encountered all sorts of bizarre sights. There was a man-made utopia not too far under the ground called Ultimate Thule that an insane member of the party destroys; said member naturally turns rapacious toward Charlie when he reasons that he will be going to paradise so that his actions now have no further consequences. There was the appearance of what seemed to be actual demons, which led the remaining members of a party on a long and perilous chase. There were extremes of heat and cold, tornadoes, razor-sharp ice cities, oceans of magma, roots suspended from vaulted ceilings, and giant sloth-like creatures that one could hitch a ride on. The book is a relentless visual feast of crazy action sequences that never allow the characters or reader more than a moment of rest before the status quo changes. Things really start to get interesting once the breathless pace of the book eases and Charlie (whose black dot eyes along with the red hair make her a ringer for Little Orphan Annie) finds evidence that Christopher is still alive. When the priest and Charlie finally find what seems to be a secure location, she encounters a demon whose horn she had partially lopped off earlier in the book--only the creature is not only attracted to her, he's submissive to her and enjoys being hit. By this point, Charlie's half-naked and she's turned on by the beast and has sex with him. That only intensifies the guilty hallucinations of her mother, who taunts her for actually having sex with a demon. This is the beginning of the complete breakdown in structure with the characters, as the priest imprisons them, believing that it wasn't safe to leave. He had created his own little utopia, a running theme in the book as every time a character believes they've managed to achieve this, it gets smashed to bits. The end of the book brings up certain moral issues not unlike Conrad's. When they finally find Christopher, it's slowly revealed that being in this environment has revealed him for what he truly is: a monstrous, selfish manipulator. Unlike Conrad, that transformation becomes literal in a series of horrifying pages that Charlie barely survives. Christopher never has a "the horror, the horror" moment; instead, he falls into that abyss that he gazed into in a figurative and literal sense. The world of Satania is a sentient but completely amoral ecosystem that exists to move, thrash around and destroy, but the obvious point that Vehlmann and Kerascoet make is that it's really not that much different from the surface world. Or rather, it's a difference of degree and not kind, but in neither case is it to be lauded as something utopian. That's really punched home with the final pages, where getting back to the surface is less a matter of returning to civilization than it is making a choice between two different worlds with different rules regarding cultural mores but surprisingly similar rules regarding survival. Unlike Beautiful Darkness, whose ending seems happy at first but is actually horrific upon further contemplation, the ending of this book isn't so much happy as it is an acknowledgment that we ultimately are responsible for our own choices, and it's that agency that Charlie relies upon throughout the book that saves her. She's the only character uninfected by cold science or fervid beliefs that negate humanity; she has the flexibility of her brother with regard to adapting to her environment without his evangelical embrace of the id-ruled nihilism that Satania represents. That fits neatly into Kerascoet and their collaborators writing books about violence, horror and deviancy that wind up finding the conventions and authorities of society every bit as monstrous and dangerous. The ending of Beautiful Darkness is horrible not because the main character found a "home" with the giant, but rather because this conventional love she felt was for a person who had killed her host. In Satania, it's Charlie's flexibility and unflappability that allow her to overcome both the physical and philosophical dangers she's presented with.

Off-Beat Fairy Tales: Beautiful Darkness

The week in off-beat fairy tales and other weird stories focuses on an actual fairy tale: Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet's Beautiful Darkness. Described by some as "Thumbelina meets Lord of the Flies", the book has a take-no-prisoners approach in coldly examining an environment in a manner that elicits gasps. One gets the sense that the authors took great delight in subverting reader expectation on every page as they raised the stakes on what kind of horrible and/or horrifying event they could cook up next. Vehlmann's best known English translation was the Jason-illustrated book Isle of 100,000 Graves, while Keraskoet is the illustration duo comprised of Marie Pommepuy and Sebastien Cosset, best known to English-speakers as the artists behind the lurid Miss Don't-Touch-Me series.

The book starts with one of the most terrifying and yet hilarious fake-outs ever. The kind fairy girl Aurora is aided by her friend Plim to help her impress the Prince who has come to visit her for tea and cake. That first page of interactions couldn't be any more steeped in stereotypical modern children's fairy tropes. If you've ever seen the Australian TV show The Fairies, you'll know precisely what I'm talking about. When something red drips from the ceiling into the cup and the ceiling itself caves in, the focus pulls back and there's chaos and mayhem everywhere as the host body for the fairies falls down dead. She's a little girl who dies in the middle of a forest for unknown reasons, but all of the creatures living inside of her must react to her death, one way or another.

This is a reverse-quest book in that it starts with a large cast that is slowly winnowed-down as the book proceeds. While there's plenty of unexpected gore and violence (a cat comes in the night to prey upon the fairy camp, a toad eats the Prince, a fairy who was part of a group of triplets gets dragged off to an ant hill), it's the character interaction that proves to be far more cruel and horrifying. Hierarchies based on little more than intimidation and personal charisma form to subvert the fairy utopia Aurora worked tirelessly to create, one that would end with her marrying the Prince. Her basic sense of kindness blinds her to the machinations of others, like the vain and cold-hearted Zelie. The authors suggest that some of the fairies correspond to potential aspects of their host who just died; Zelie bears a striking resemblance to a doll she carried, for example, and Aurora is the name of the company on a notebook she carried. While most of the fairies took to the forest and tried to negotiate a life with the animals therein, one fairy is unwilling to depart the corpse. In a series of scenes that start off as revolting (the fairy eats the maggots now inhabiting the decaying host body in a visceral fashion) and wind up as sad and pathetic, as she starts to dream that she was the girl and later finds herself quite isolated in the girl's eyesockets, shivering and afraid.

Seeing characters betray each other and seek to gain an advantage over each other at a moment's notice, as I mentioned earlier, is the truly disturbing characteristic of this book. The character of Plim embodies this sort of feckless self-advancement, as he is content to be lead thug for Zelie after bullying and intimidating any number of other characters into doing work for him or taking what's theirs. It takes a while for Aurora to learn that the others view her leadership as a benign organizer as a kind of joke when they all betray her affection for the Prince, leading her to leave. When the feckless fairies manage to find her safely snug in the cabin of a human, it looks like the pattern is going to repeat itself as Zellie installs herself as being in charge and immediately sets upon finding punishments for Aurora. Aurora ponders leaving this all behind but returns not because she has no other choice, but because the clever and industrious fairy has a plan. When she takes advantage of the fact that the other fairies believe her to be oblivious and overly trusting, Aurora leads them to a final fate that's fitting for them and for her, as the starry-eyed dreamer winds up finding her prince after all, after a fashion. Only in a fairy-tale such as this can such a brutal and vicious ending be construed as a happy one.

Visually, Kerascoet plies beautiful water colors on top of simply-rendered and cute characters. This makes the scenes of death, decay and violence all the more jarring. That's especially true when they visually reference stories like The Borrowers or The Wind In The Willows to give a sense of what happens when these tiny creatures meet actual forest predators and their desires. Even saintly Aurora is not immune to fits of violence, as when she claws the eyes out of a mouse who had betrayed her with her tiny, needle-like nails. That scene establishes her understanding of the forest as a place where one either adapts or gets killed and puts an end to her viewing herself as a benevolent, wise and admired figure and leads her to understand that there's a sucker born every minute--and that she's been a sucker. Without their mastery of the studied cuteness of each character and the subtle gradations in mood and emotion they express (the doll-like Zelie in particular is a masterpiece in terms of a character going from blank to malevolent with disarming speed), the narrative simply wouldn't work. Similarly, the final image of the book, when Aurora gets her happy ending, is that of the cabin in the snowy woods, a light blazing from a window. It's like something out of a pictorial depiction of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" or Norman Rockwell in the way it captures warmth, only the reader knows what lies beneath. Drawn & Quarterly certainly made sure that the visual impact of the book was not muted in its translation.

Baser Instincts: Miss Don't Touch Me

Rob reviews the recent English translation of MISS DON'T TOUCH ME, written by French author Hubert and drawn by the team of Kerascoet (NBM).


Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics once noted, a number of years ago, that what the American comics market lacked was "good crap". That is, there were plenty of adolescent super-hero comics around and a decent number of literary/art comics, but not much in the way of a true mainstream for adults. He also noted that the French were especially good at producing "good crap"; comics that one wouldn't elevate to the highest levels of art, but were still compelling in a number of ways and told a great story.

MISS DON'T TOUCH ME, recently published and translated by NBM, is a perfect example of "good crap". It's a murder-mystery story set in a turn of the 20th century French brothel. Such a story could be remarkably exploitative in the manner of a Cinemax erotic thriller, and there indeed some of those elements present. What makes this story rise above the inherent limitations of its setting and genre is the way Hubert depicts the most lurid acts in a somewhat blase' fashion. In a sense, this is as much a workplace story as it is a thriller, as the girls in the brothel have schedules and the madame fills out ledgers. Hubert also gets in some sly social commentary regarding class, especially with regard to whom ultimately takes the fall for the murders.


Above all else, it's the playful, almost bigfoot art from the husband-and-wife art team Kerascoet that gives the book a number of odd tensions. They are the artists behind the Early Years stories of DUNGEON, and their sensibilities unsurprisingly lay somewhere between Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar. Their character design has a playfulness to it that retains the practiced sexiness of the brothel's women but adds little tics here and there. There's also more than a little touch of the grotesque and the exaggerated in their character design, like the plump madame, the gangly cocaine dealer and the brutish & stumpy member of royalty who is a regular at the brothel.



The story operates on another level: fish-out-of-water situation comedy. The story follows Blance, a naive and virginal maid, who demands entrance into the brothel after her sister is murdered in cold blood and turns up as a victim of the serial killer called "The Butcher of the Dances". She manages to finagle herself a job as "Miss Don't Touch Me", a dominatrix who furiously whips those who "misbehave" and is never touched. The other women of the brothel take an instant dislike to her--especially since she replaced someone murdered by the "Butcher of the Dances". The artists take an interesting risk in making their protagonist shrill and neurotic, managing to both play this for laughs and heighten tension when she's in danger. Visually, Blanche is all angles--sharp nose, switchblade body, pointy chin. Only her eyes, when bugged out, add any roundness to her features. That heightens the contrast between her and the other women in the brothel, who are of course all curves.

After we are introduced to the premise, the story is a series of seeming allies being untrustworthy and characters with mysterious motives becoming life-savers. The story's shifting sands keep the reader guessing as to who's really responsible for the crimes, even if Blanche quickly becomes gripped with certainty as to the identity of the killers. The climax of the story, when we learn just how wrapped up certain members of the brothel are with the serial killer story, is nasty and visceral in a way that's unexpected. After a number of light storytelling touches (especially with the introduction of Josephine, a transexual African-American prostitute whose shtick is to resemble Josephine Baker), the end was particularly grim. Kerascoet depicted Blanche's eyes bugging out of her head when she was committing acts of violence or generally alarmed, but in that final scene, there was a certain steely resolve in her eyes.



While Blanche does take her revenge, the story doesn't exactly have a happy ending. Blanche is still a bit adrift and realizes she has nowhere else to go but the brothel (a bittersweet realization), the real killers go unpunished because of their prominence in society, and one of the story's few seeming innocents goes to a swift and brutal execution. Those odd minor notes modulate the story's lurid nature. That luridness is almost always present in stories playing up the intersection between sex and death, and the artists do little to downplay those scenes, but the story's characterization and underlying commentary prevent it from wallowing completely in filth. Indeed, Hubert, through the story's prostitutes, notes that it's the rest of the world that's wallowing in filth and hypocrisy; only the prostitutes are getting paid for providing an outlet for it. That's a realization that dawns on Blanche at the story's end, and may be why we see her crack a little smile when she realizes that this is her home. MISS DON'T TOUCH ME is both exploitative and in turn commenting on the nature of exploitation, and that natural tension of ideas is wrapped in a tightly-wound murder-mystery plot and turned on its head by the art.