Trondheim & Sfar's Dungeon: The Early Years

Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's Dungeon (or Donjon, in the original French) is my favorite comics series of all time. It's a giant, sprawling epic that's both a love letter to and a send-up of fantasy spectacles. It spoofs overly convoluted world-building and plots while establishing its own deep lore. The essence of the story is this: there is a dungeon, run by its Keeper, that actively encourages adventurers to attempt to take its treasures. Of course, it's full of horrible monsters and traps designed to murder any party, which means the keeper takes all of their treasure as well. All of its characters are anthropomorphic animals, which makes sense since Trondheim drew most of the early series, and that is his style. 

The main title, nicknamed "Zenith," shows the dungeon at its height and introduces an idiot duck named Herbert trying to get a job in the dungeon. He befriends the Keeper's top man, a dragon named Marvin, and accidentally acquires a sword that demands he go on a quest. It's funny but also satisfying as a solid piece of genre fiction. The conceit is that Dungeon would run for a hundred volumes, but Zenith only had 10 volumes.

Trondheim & Sfar didn't want to do a conventional narrative. They wanted to play with the story in fun ways, asking the question, "Hey, how does it all wind up?" So they zoomed ahead to volume 101, starting a series of stories called "Twilight." Years later, we see what became of Herbert, Marvin, and many others, and it's a surprisingly grim story, still leavened by lots of slapstick. If that wasn't enough, they zoomed back in time to volume -99, called "The Early Years," which introduces us to the keeper in his youth. (There are also Antipodes + and -, which go way further into the future and past, but those haven't been translated into English yet.) 

NBM had originally published these in small digest format, which hurt the reproduction of the art, which was originally published in France in the oversized album format. NBM finally reprinted them again at the right size and published all of the Early Years stories. The six original French albums have been published in two editions: The Early Years Vol 1-2: The Night Shirt, and The Early Years Vol 3: Without A Sound. Overall, these volumes are a great improvement over the previous editions. There are still some quirks; there are lettering errors in the translation, for example. It's still exciting to see so many volumes of Dungeon translated into English, though NBM's recent shift to mostly doing biographies would seem to indicate there won't be any more forthcoming. 

There is a consistent character arc in the series that is reflected by the protagonist of each of the main series. The hero initially is highly naive and idealistic, but they are eventually worn down by their experiences and become corrupted and cynical. This happens to the Keeper, aka Hyacinth de Cavallere, and it happens to Herbert (and it's shocking when it does). Marvin the Red, the hero of "Twilight," is certainly naive at the beginning, but as the world literally falls apart, his narrative goes in the opposite direction: from a wannabe hard-boiled killer to a family man. 

"The Early Years" focuses on Hyacinth's journey from pampered son of a warlord to cold-blooded assassin. Both Early Years and Twilight depict an old order crumbling before the eyes of the protagonists, and the stories are that of adaptation and finding a new steady-state. In "The Early Years," the old world of knights, warlords, and chivalry came to an end, symbolized by the fall of the capital city Antipolis. It's the seat of all knowledge and law, but it's being undone by its own corruption, greed, and squalor. The first three volumes (-99, -98, and -97) detail Hyacinth becoming a sort of bumbling vigilante named "The Night Shirt," who fights for justice in the corrupt city. His undoing is falling in love with a snake-woman assassin named Alexandra. 

The narrative then jumps ahead to volumes -84, -83, and -82. Hyacinth is rich and powerful, and secretly the head of the assassin's guild, but he is in mourning because his lover Alexandra has murdered his sweet wife. His own greed helps settle the city's destruction, and he's forced to flee to his family castle. By the end of the last volume, he's assembled the crew that would make up the foundation of his dungeon, including a five-year-old Marvin the Dragon. Christophe Blain drew the first four volumes, and he was an outstanding choice as someone who has done so many action epics. Working within the Dungeon style, Christophe Gaultier brings a darker, grittier quality to the story than the others, but it's fitting for how nasty his chapter was. Stephane Oiry's chapter is brighter and clearer, which was also befitting a more optimistic story. Selecting the right artists for the job showed that Trondheim & Sfar were smart editors in addition to being great artists. "The Early Years" might be my favorite entries in the whole Dungeon saga, as they are satisfying in how they create the character narrative as well as having tons of fun lore-related easter eggs for fans of the rest of the series. 

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. 

Uncivilized: Joann Sfar's Pascin

Joann Sfar's idiosyncratic biography of the early 20th century painter Jules Pascin has been critiqued in some circles for glorifying the sexual conquests of male artists and buffing up that kind of macho narrative. Upon reading Pascin, I found the opposite to be true: this was a profoundly sad and meditative study about an artist searching for something that would ever and always be out of his grasp. The other thing to keep in mind about this book is that biographies tend to have autobiographical qualities, as the biographers often tend to seek out and empathize with their subjects, be it a deliberate act or a subconscious one. I see Pascin as a deeply meditative look at an artist who was a clear aesthetic influence on Sfar, digging deep into trying to figure out what made him tick, what made him think, what made him create and ultimately what he feared most. If anything, the book seems a deliberate rejection of the image of the macho artist and toxic masculinity in general.

One example is Pascin meeting young Ernest Hemingway (the patron saint of macho artists) and humiliating him simply be calling out exactly what he knew Hemingway wanted: to not just have sex with one of the two women in Pascian's company, but to act as the white knight savior. In another example, one of Pascin's friends in the book is a gangster named Toussaint. He is the embodiment of the use of force to get one's way, but he hangs around Pascin because he's jealous of the painter's power of creation. Sfar is careful not to elevate what Pascin does over Toussaint's brutality; instead, there's a telling sequence where Pascin talks about how drawing is a kind of sexual substitute, a way of grasping at life and creating it on one's own and doing whatever one wants with it. In the philosophical discussions of art Pascin has with other painters like Antanas and Soutine, the question of just how to bring life to an image is the most crucial aspect of art. It's not just a matter of simultaneity on multiple planes like in Cubism, but rather an attempt at rendering all aspects of a subject in a phenomenological manner. Or as Antanas says, "You have to walk all the way around it to get the full picture" in order to get many viewpoints to resolve in a single image. The ability to do so, Pascin seems to be arguing, is no more or less noble or remarkable than seducing someone or beating them up.

This gets to the heart of the tragedy of Pascin as a character: he is desperately searching for something because he's been broken for a long time, but can't get it through either sex or art. Contrast Pascin to his friends Soutine or Marc Chagall, especially in the scene where all three get together for Yom Kippur. As a Jewish person, Sfar has spent much of his career exploring what it means to be a Jew, both in a religious sense and in an ethnic sense. He's explored many different ethnic variations and traditions surrounding Judaism, and his characters have engaged in the language of the religion, which is the language of debate. The debate, and the holiday itself, which is the day of atonement, revealed interesting things about all three men. Chagall was clearly leading the healthiest life, with a loving wife and a sense of purpose that embraced the power of the aesthetic without being consumed by it. Soutine was a misanthrope who was all too aware of his misanthropy and had come to accept it as he indulged his artistic obsessions.

Pascin told a long story about a time when he was a child and stole from his father in order to visit a brothel. Unlike his friends, who had hard early lives and risked everything for their art, Pascin was dismissive of his own ability. As would be revealed later, he simply wanted to be better at fucking than his father, wanted the power notoriety that going to a brothel would give him in school, and didn't care about the consequences. All throughout telling the story, Pascin angered Chagall with hilarious blasphemies, until he reached the end of the story, when he revealed that another man was blamed for stealing the money and he hanged himself out of humiliation. That was an obvious flashpoint for him that sent him down a path mixed with desperation and a love-hate relationship with art and sex. He became great at both (" a true pervert", his ex would say), having sex with men and women alike, as a kind of unspoken, eternal contest he had with himself and his father. Drawing and sex were two sides of the same coin, one leading to the other in a feedback loop.

Sfar's art has never looked better. It loosens up so much on some pages as to become almost abstracted; it's deeply expressive and packs a relentless emotional punch. At the same time, much about the story and his visual approach is funny, filthy and whimsical. Pascin externalized his fears through a razor-sharp wit and and relentless charismatic manner. He was much more a personality than his other artist friends and was resigned to the self-pitying misanthrope Soutine coming around and begging him to help him in the social realm. The women in the story range from naive to brilliant, with other historical figures like Kike de Montparnasse having key roles and engaging in the same kind of philosophical discussions as Pascin. For Pascin, some of them mean little to him and some (like the married Lucy) are loved with all he can give. It is clear that in many respects, they remain as much a mystery to him (if a familiar, comfortable mystery) as they were the first time he visited that brothel. He was chasing an experience he could never have, creating art to scratch an itch that could never be satisfied. Sfar helps create that sense of inner turbulence by varying his line: thicky and brushy on some pages, clear line on others, open layouts on some pages, grids on others, gray-scale on some pages, spotting blacks on others, cartoony on some pages, naturalistic and grittily detailed on others. It's an affectionate but clear-eyed take on an artist, warts and all, and the kind of questions about aesthetics that vexed Pascin and clearly vex Sfar as well.

Tying Up Knots: Dungeon Twilight Volume 4

The Lewis Trondheim/Joann Sfar epic series, Dungeon, was finally tied up with a frenetic, over-the-top conclusion that lived up to the many prior volumes. These books are best read back-to-back, because there are so many characters and plot twists that it's hard to crack open a new volume and be expected to remember everything--especially six chapters into this story. Dungeon has always been Sfar and Trondheim's fantasy playground series, wherein they get to play around with genre conventions while gently tweaking them at the same time. The heart of the series surrounds lazy duck Herbert and badass dragon Marvin; their ascent began in the "Zenith" series of the Dungeon books. The origins of the fully-stocked Dungeon were told in the "Early Years" series. While the authors jokingly noted that there would be a hundred volumes in each series, they wound up producing a still incredibly-impressive forty volumes, when you throw in the various Monstres, Parade and other affiliated series.

The first of two collected volumes in the 4th volume of NBM's Dungeon Twilight collection is titled High Septentrion. Essentially, Sfar and Trondheim caused the end of the world in previous volumes, seemingly as a way for them to come up with one of their never-ending storytelling solutions to thorny plot twists. The genius of the Dungeon series is that each chapter's plot-dependent twist is inevitably a wacky gag that is nonetheless treated with deadly seriousness. In this case, the twist is wiry rabbit warrior Marvin the Red continually switching bodies with the zaftig cat-woman Zakutu. The reason why is so that some objects of power stay safe, but it allows Sfar and Trondheim to go nuts with Marvin fondling his new body at every opportunity. The other thing that made this series great was not just the frenzied action (there's actually an incredibly tense climax in this book) or the wacky gags, but the way Sfar & Trondheim cleverly developed every character. There's a density of character built up through book after book that makes the denouement of this book especially pleasant, as a changed Zakutu and Marvin the Red go off to find adventure together. The artist Alfred handled the visuals in this story, hewing close to the character designs set down by Trondheim but adding bits of flair here and there.

Of course, the real heart of the series is Herbert and Marvin the Dragon. They are the stars of the final volume, The End Of Dungeon. It's a worthy final entry, as the two old friends fight together and against each other, get captured, pull of an incredible escape and finally finish off the "Dark Entity" that caused them so much trouble. The exact plot details are incredibly convoluted for any newcomers, but suffice it to say that there's not only a satisfying ending, there's also a lovely coda about the nature of fame worthy of Shelley. Once again, all of that is less important than the focus on the two main characters and the genuine affection they share for each other over many years. Sfar and Trondheim also slip in an extended bathroom joke that fits in perfectly with the frequently vulgar humor the series has always possessed. That's been a key element in their spoofing the fantasy genre: establishing their characters as human (or anthropomorphic animals, as the case may be), with human desires, frailties and physical qualities. These quests are based in mud and dirt and all the characters are essentially bags of meat and bones, all of which will fade away. That sense that everything great will eventually come to a bitter end, that there's no such thing as an ending (happy or otherwise), adds a sense of pervading sadness to the proceedings. Serving up the tart with the sweetness of comedy and action is another reason why Dungeon is the greatest genre series of all time.

Sequart Reprints: Little Vampire, Kaput & Zosky

First Second continues to build on their impressive stockpile of comics aimed at kids with collections of Lewis Trondheim's Kaput & Zosky and Joann Sfar's Little Vampire. Both of these comics have appeared in English in other formats, at least in pieces. Some Kaput & Zosky shorts were translated in the much-missed Trondheim spotlight series The Nimrod that Fantagraphics used to publish. A couple of the Little Vampire stories were published by Simon & Schuster five years ago, but the series ended there. First Second, with their solid design, aggressive and smart marketing and understanding of how to reach their desired audience, picked up the banner for Sfar and Trondheim.

Little Vampire is the prequel of sorts for Vampire Loves, another charmingly ambling set of stories featuring the friendly vampire. Little Vampire lives in a haunted castle with all sorts of monsters and ghosts. His desire to go to school leads to an amusing sequence where his mother and father (who turns out to be the Flying Dutchman) arrange for the whole menagerie to attend a school at night. He does the homework for a human boy, and the two wind up as fast friends. Sfar manages to make the monsters and ghosts simultaneously friendly and gruesome. Maintaining that balance is his best trick--the supernatural in all its occasionally frightening forms is on every page, yet the boldness of Little Vampire and the boy Michael offer a reassuring presence for even the youngest of readers.

The stories are Sfar at his best. The first story is about friendship, the second is about standing up to bullies, and the third is about animal cruelty. Sfar manages to get across lessons in the least didactic manner possible, thanks to his lively line, attention to the forward propulsion of the story's action, and vivid colors. At the same time, he's not afraid to go off on tangents and character soliloquies, trusting his audience enough to know that they'll realize that he'll snap back into the main narrative shortly. The second story, "Little Vampire Does Kung-Fu", takes a pretty simple idea (Michael must deal with a bully) and takes it into some very odd directions.

Michael and LV step into a painting in the haunted castle, where a rabbi points him in a direction where he can learn kung-fu. In a hilarious sequence, Michael goes through a clever series of vignettes to achieve his quest--only to find that the castle monsters have eaten his tormentor. Realizing that that would never do, he and Little Vampire have to consult a group of sorcerers to bring him back to life, but not before nearly sparking a wizard war. Finally, the bully was brought back to life a little too effectively--he became a monstrous giant who nearly squashed our heroes before they got a little help from LV's father. This story encapsulates what Sfar does so well here--he creates a narrative that doesn't talk down to children, but rather respects their intelligence and thirst for the unusual, the bizarre and even the scatological, all while crafting characters that are enormously sympathetic, distinctive and affectionate. Above all else, these stories are funny--the drawings are funny to look at, and his dialogue is filled with punchlines, plays on words and even amusing non sequiturs.

On the other hand, Lewis Trondheim's Kaput & Zosky is done in the tradition of the Warner Brothers or Terrytoons--stylish, hilarious and glorious cartoonish violence for its own sake. These stories are about two inept intergalactic conquerors whom, despite their taste for mayhem, find themselves foiled on every planet they visit. These stories were mostly drawn by Eric Cartier in a style very similar to Trondheim's, and they were later adapted for an animated series that was once aired on Nicktoons. This collection also contains a number of "The Cosmonaut" strips, written and drawn by Trondheim. In gag stories like this, Trondheim is at his best because his plots unfold like puzzles, slowly unveiling the story's clever solution (and resolution) in hilarious fashion.

For example, a planet where every being obeys them not only frustrates their desire to conquer bloodily, it winds up driving them off the planet when Kaput's suggestions of things he doesn't want to happen come to pass. On one planet, when Kaput wins on a slot machine and doesn't want the money (preferring money stolen), the money keeps doubling and doubling until he owns the entire planet--and then walks away because he doesn't want to rule a world without "kicking butt". They conquer another world by getting elected in a democratic process and are forced to flee when they're expected to live up to their promises ("...the ugly shall be beautiful!"). The duo are fleeced by a traveling arms merchant who sells weapons and something to overcome them to both our protagonists and the planet they're trying to conquer. When Kaput manages to solve the problem of the annoying salesman in a very direct fashion, it leads to the natives learning from his example and driving them off.

Like all of his comics aimed at kids, Trondheim really makes them for his own enjoyment first and foremost. As a result, any adult can read and enjoy them for the liveliness of the art, the clever storytelling, and the way he manages to slip between sophisticated and crude humor so effortlessly. The "Cosmonaut" interstitial pages fit in perfectly with this style of humor, and are perhaps even more vicious and scatological than the Kaput & Zosky strips. This book is not quite as appealing as the stories from Dungeon , mostly because these are deliberately one-note characters designed to fit a certain kind of story design. These stories are pure parody, sending up sci-fi's hoary cliches while still managing to utilize clever premises. Kaput & Zosky isn't the first book I'd recommend for someone looking to explore Trondheim's work, but it still serves as an example of his long winning streak in comics--I don't think I've ever read a Trondheim story that wasn't at least clever, well-crafted and enjoyable to read at worst, and transcendentally brilliant at best.

Sequart Reprints: Sardine, Tiny Tyrant, Black Diamond Detective Agency, Professor's Daughter

The newest Sardine In Outer Space book is more of the same. Sardine, her uncle Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie fly around the universe having light-hearted adventures. They're always running up against space dictator Supermuscleman and his mad scientist Doc Krok. This edition gets a bit meta, as our heroes are not only aware that they're the stars of a comic, but that they also only get 10 pages a story! Guibert and Sfar run with this idea in "Why Don't We Make A Movie?", where famous movie director Kubik tries to convince the gang to let him make a movie about them. The plot he describes comes to life as our heroes have a big space fight with Supermuscleman, but Sardine tells Kubik that his ideas aren't quite as exciting as their real lives.

The book is at its best when the premises are at their most absurd, because the plots are repetitive. The best stories include a visit to the Kingdom of Yummy, with fields of french fries, wild Burgeegies, the ketchup eruptions of Mount St. Heinz, and Weddingcake Mountain--with the King and Queen atop it. Along the meta lines, "The Sabotage Artist" is about a plot to make Sardine's comic unpopular by adding poorly-drawn characters, thanks to Supermuscleman. Then there's the Queen of Applet and her agents Dotcom, Clickalink and Doubleclick, who steal a statue and get tracked by the kids. As I noted in my review of the previous edition of Sardine, the book is best read a bit at a time, because there's not a lot of story or characterization to latch on to. However, it's ideal for younger children, especially those just getting into "real" books and comics. While Sardine's set-up is limited, the wacky scenarios that Guibert cooks up and Sfar playfully draws is a great way to get kids into comics.

Tiny Tyrant, on the other hand, is a stunningly hilarious work because of its tight plots and superb gag resolution. That's no surprise, considering that Lewis Trondheim is a gagman supreme, in addition to his many other talents. He's aided by the fantastically clean & expressive art of Fabrice Parme, whose style is reminiscient of 1960's animation. This clear-line style is a nice match for the frantic and energetic stories of young King Ethelbert, 6-year-old ruler of Portocristo. The king is a spoiled brat and terrorizes his ministers and citizens with his whims. The design of this book is fantastic: panel frames are left out. Instead, each story has a pastel background that brings the most out of the linework and the bolder colors used for the figures.
With the knowledge that Ethelbert is a little spoiled brat who will happily threaten those who disagree with him, Trondheim concocts plots that come up with an escalating set of problems and then devises an unexpected solution. In "The Ethelbertosaurus", the king is told of a dinosaur fossil being found. He immediately wants it named after himself, but balks when he sees it's a tiny creature. Wanting a larger dinosaur, he demands that his scientists create one. Through an unlikely series of events, one is created that immediately menaces him. The creature is sent back in time with Ethelbert (by accident), and the story resolves itself with a wacky set of events that is topped by a punchline that cleverly folds in events from earlier in the story.

What makes these stories so funny is that Trondheim stacks gag on top of gag, giving each story a momentum that plows toward the punchline at the end. Parme is more than up to the task of illustrating these gags, given his exaggerated figures and facial expressions. In "Safety First", Ethelbert is assigned a personal bodyguard. In order to test how good he is, he takes out a contract on his own life, and we proceed to see his bodyguard rescue him from catastrophe after catastrophe. Parme drawing "the Dastardly Detroiters" popping up out of a bunch of garbage cans is a hilarious image, one of many in a story that has genuine excitement from panel to panel. Once again, the final punchline is not only funny, it unexpectedly references an earlier plot point.

In The Professor's Daughter, Sfar and Guibert trade roles for what was actually their breakthrough work a decade ago. Guibert's moody, fuzzy art here meshes well with Sfar's melancholy fantasy romance. What I like best about this story is that its most absurd aspects are played straight. In Victorian England, an archeologist's daughter falls in love with the mummy of a former Egyptian pharoah that has come to life. Sfar understands what makes for a compeling story, because the plot is less concerned with the hows of the mummy's return than why he falls in love with the woman. Sfar spins this into a story of a son's relationship with his father, and crosses it with an ocean adventure, a prison breakout, a courtroom drama, and an absurd encounter with Queen Victoria. The comic almost feels as though it was originally twice as long, but Sfar cut out everything that wasn't essential to the story. Indeed, on the first page of the story, we're introduced to the mummy wearing a suit and out on the town with the titular daughter.

Color is a crucial component in the story's emotional narrative; the washed-out tones (watercolors?) evoke their environment so acutely that one can almost feel the fog or smell the ocean reflected in a cabin's light. As delicate as the coloring is, it's the liveliness of Guibert's figures that add drama to the action. The dreamy quality of the art allows the reader to make an easy transition between the action and several dream sequences, as well as even more absurd sequences like two mummies being laid up in hospital beds. While the book certainly has its share of shenanigans, it lingers in one's imagination because of the underlying sadness and emptiness of all its characters. The attempt to fill that void is at the heart of the book, and even the final page of the book has its own moment of tragedy despite what is otherwise a happy outcome. This book just feels like both artists having an enormous amount of fun riffing off each other, using a kitchen-sink approach to throw in everything they wanted in a story, and leaving out whatever disinterested them. It's simply a pleasure to read, from beginning to end.

Lastly, we have Eddie Campbell's The Black Diamond Detective Agency. It's based on a screenplay, and promises "mayhem, mystery, romance, mine shafts, bullets" and it certainly delivers. The story takes place around the turn of the 20th century in the American west--both in a small town and the big city. The anxiety surrounding the changes in the modern world is a running subplot that winds up holding the key to the story's mystery. The story begins with an argument between a man and a woman and the destruction of a train that kills dozens in his small town that is subsequently attributed to him. The man, John Hardin, is the sort of super-competent but haunted hero that's enormously compelling. Throwing him in with the eponymous private detective agency reminded me a bit of "The Fugitive", except the twist is that Hardin manages to disguise himself enough to temporarily join the agency!

While the story has interesting characters and some intriguing twists & turns, it really isn't much more than a rousing potboiler of an adventure story. What distinguishes it is the tour-de-force of design and composition that Campbell creates on the page. He combines his trademark scratchy style with a washed-out palette that perfectly depicts the grit and grime of the era. Acts of violence are in bold penstrokes and brighter color, popping them off the page. The pages go from full-page splashes to smaller grids to panels placed at odd angles to move the eye along the page with confusing images. Those readers who know Campbell from his autobiographical work might forget that his long-running adventure series Bacchus; he's no stranger to convoluted adventure stories. Still, this book isn't in the same league as something like Fate of the Artist, but it's a more-than-amusing diversion.

Once again, First Second excels at advancing comics that are another strain of "new mainstream" books. These comics are accessible to anyone, and the fact that they aggressively market comics for kids as well reflects the vision of the line's editor, Mark Siegel. He wanted comics to attain the same sort of respect and widespread cultural importance that they have in France, and wisely aimed his books directly at the bookstore market, but has done this so as to attract a wide audience. I wouldn't regard any of the books in this most recent wave as Great Works, but they do address comics' need for more solid, accessible and entertaining works. The term "middlebrow" is a bit too much of a pejorative to describe these well-drawn and written comics. These are, however, comics that anyone could enjoy but are clearly the personal vision of the artists involved.

Sequart Reprints: Rabbi's Cat 2

This review was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
*********************
The first English translation of Joann Sfar's that I read was The Rabbi's Cat. I was immediately struck by the pleasantly ambling plot, the expressive & loose art, and the lively way in which Sfar grappled with questions of faith, ethnicity and identity. Grounding the book in its titular narrator, a cat that gains (and later loses) the ability to speak, he displays an enormous amount of affection for his Jewish roots in North Africa while still engaging and gently chiding rhetoric for its own sake. With the cat, the Rabbi Abraham Sfar, his daughter and the truly inspired character of Malka of the Lions (the Rabbi's cousin), Sfar manipulates the plot to simply fall in place around the lives of these characters. The way Sfar can jump between lighthearted farce and adventure to weighty matters of philosophy (frequently on the same page) is aided by the vividness of his characters, with the cat acting as the ultimate cynic.

The new volume, featuring the stories "Heaven On Earth" and "Africa's Jerusalem", has a slightly more didactic feel to its stories. Sfar more explicitly grapples with issues relating to both anti-semitism and racism. In an author's note, it's clear that he was somewhat reluctant to go in this direction but eventually notes "Chances are everything's already been said, but since no one is paying attention you have to start all over again." Sfar makes both stories work because he successfully disguises his moral medicine in the form of funny but often rip-roaring adventure stories.

"Heaven On Earth" sees Malka, the con man/living legend, growing old with his trained lion. Malka is regarded more as a curiosity than an imposing figure who saves entire towns from his (on-demand) bloodthirsty lion, and he can't bear to live like that. So he ingeniously finds a way to create a mythology around his own death as yet another way of drumming up business. In the end, an act of political courage against an anti-semitic politician, done with no other motivation than anger and outrage, winds up really ensuring his legend. That neatly ties into the nature of political struggle and political identity, an issue that is still obviously quite a valuable one. The nature of Jewish identity, belief and behavior is at once strictly codified in ancient writings and subject to thousands of years of honest debate and shifty rhetoric. Still, the idea of a religion and an ethnicity that is constantly shifting and evolving based on the nature of this unfolding communal argument obviously fascinates Sfar. It's certainly led him to sympathize with any number of viewpoints, especially as Abraham is constantly battling with his own faith.

"Africa's Jerusalem" is the most complex "Rabbi's Cat" story to date. The whole story is one long debate of sorts about the ways different religions go about their practices, the nature of fanaticism, the possibility of ecumenical communication, the way race plays into all of these factors and much more. While Sfar hammers down on his overall message pretty hard, he creates a compelling narrative by growing the story organically from the way his characters interact and then crafting an adventure story that's a sly parody in many ways. The story begins with the rabbi's daughter having trouble with her new husband, himself a rabbi more obsessed with books than her own happiness. We then meet a Russian refugee escaping from a brutal pogrom shortly after the 1917 revolution who winds up by accident in Algeria, where the story is set. There's plenty of comedy mined out of his inability to communicate, including Rabbi Sfar's old teacher thinking the Russian is a golem.

The Rabbi finally looks up a priest who helps him find a local Russian, who is now an atheist. He helps translate for the young Russian immigrant, who happens to be a painter. It turns out he's looking for a legendary "black Jerusalem" in Ethiopia, with a lost tribe of "black Jews" where he hopes to be part of a new Israel. Abraham says that there's no such as a black Jew (saying it would be too much to bear for a single people to have had to endure pogroms and slavery), but the story appears to be true. So the Russians, Abraham, and the cat set out across Africa to try and find this city. They meet up with Abraham's cousin, a Muslim cleric, who joins their party.

What follows is a series of adventures that's both in homage to and a parody of Tintin. The puckish explorer even makes a cameo as the ignorant and condescending explorer of "Tintin and the Congo", a scathing send-up of Herge. The party winds up in a Muslim prince's camp, where there's more than a little fanaticism and a clash of religious wills, along with a surprising death. The Russian artist meets a woman and Abraham marries them (after slightly bending the rules). During the arduous trip, most of the members of the party have to halt except for the happy couple. When they reach the city, the realize that not all is as its seems and everyone's perspective can get skewed if it's too closed off. The cat here is less cynical and nasty and more respectful and helpful, even getting his ability to speak back.

What saves the book from becoming a lecture is Sfar's essential light-heartedness. Even in the most harrowing of scenes, Sfar's faith in the possibilities that humanity possesses informs his worldview. Even the jaded cat can't help but be moved by the painter and many others he meets, while not afraid of meting out punishment to those that deserve it. He was the id to the Rabbi's super-ego when the series began, but it's obvious that both characters started to meet more in the middle with this story. Both have made to see that there was more to the world than could be accounted for in their point of view, and both started to understand the folly of dogmatism--either as a dogmatic holy man or dogmatic cynic. One can't help but love both of them, because they're the most complex characters in the book. Sfar is perhaps guilty of constructing a few too many one-dimensional straw men to rail against, which makes the points he's trying to emphasize a bit too obvious. However, by making the Rabbi and his cat so delightfully ambiguous and shifting in their points of view, having their worldviews threatened at every turn, he's able to mitigate the simplicity of the antagonists with the complexity of his protagonists.

That complexity and the affection he has for his characters is what draws me as a reader to them, again and again, and it's what makes Sfar such a fabulous storyteller. Sfar's figures are loose, expressive and at times rubbery. He uses a sketchy style that he will occasionally abandon to make a dramatic point of some kind, especially with the striking figure of Malka. He uses color to carry a lot of the storytelling load, giving the book a sumptuous feel. The iconic nature of most of his characters adds a touch of lightness to the visuals, never allowing it to bog down in eye-distracting ornamentation. While there are plenty of clever decorative touches, they all serve to draw the eye into his characterizations. There's a fluidity, grace and even whimsy to this book, adding to its breezy nature as a read but never quite allowing the reader to relinquish the responsibility of digesting Sfar's message.

Sequart Reprints: Kid Lit

This article as originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
***
The three comics I'm reviewing in this space are all for children, but the contexts for each are radically different. Kevin Pyle's Blindspot is a lush, imaginative graphic novel aimed at kids 9 and up. Sardine In Outer Space 2 is a collection of stories featuring the wacky adventures of Sardine, a young girl who happens to be a space pirate. The latest Nick Mag Presents is an all-comics special aimed squarely at Nickelodeon's target audience, roughly kids 10 and under.

Going in reverse order, the new Nick Mag can be found on any magazine rack. While it features comics versions of their most popular cartoon characters (Spongebob Squarepants & Fairly OddParents), it also features an array of strips from some of alt-comics' most interesting artists. Comics editors Chris Duffy & Dave Roman (the latter a cartoonist in his own right) have been providing a steady outlet for cartoonists for quite some time. It's odd to see someone like Johnny Ryan in here, considering that most of his regular work is so filthy, but his strips still work because kids like fart jokes more than anyone. It's a particular delight to see folks like Jason Shiga do his thing in here. Shiga loves embedding comics in choose-your-own-adventure frameworks, and so it was a natural for him to do a maze where he's trying to get the Fairly OddParents to grant him wishes to get a girl to fall in love with him. Even better is an algorithm he designed later in the book to determine your perfect mate--with the determining factors being things like "lots of hair vs the color green".

That's just one example of a strip that doesn't feel at all watered-down, even if it's not exactly what the artist would do with their own work. Brian Ralph's gorgeous "Twiggy Stumps" strip, about a boy trying to find a place to stay during the winter, has exactly the same look and feel as his Cave-In or Climbing Out strips. He's not the only ex-Highwater Books cartoonist in this issue. Jordan Crane (with the nom-de-plume Jane D'Rancor) did a strip called "Shortcut", which is in a style very similar to his recent children's book The Clouds Above. Underground legend Justin Green offers a strip about humanitarian ways to kill flies, done in the same washed-out style as his regular comics. The imagination and wit that pervades the personal work of the indy cartoonists here makes the issue a pleasure to read as an adult. I especially liked the humor in Craig Thompson's comics here; he had one page with four completely separate strips, all of which impact the other somehow. Ellen Forney's comic on how to make your own autobio strip is enormously clever, as is her smaller strip that ran along the bottom of several pages.

The best thing this issue does is give a nice outlet for gag strip experts and humorists. Along with Ryan, there's the highly-underrated Karen Sneider, Sam Henderson (with his regular "Scene But Not Heard" strip), Mark Martin, Evan Dorkin & Sara Dyer, Terry LaBan, Gahan Wilson and Michael Kupperman. The latter 's strip, "The Worst Comic Book Villains That Never Existed" could have been out of an issue of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle comic, including characters like Doctor Buckethead, Pants-On-His-Head-Man (the archenemy of Underpants-On-His-Head-Man), and the Crayoniacs. I've long felt that there was a need for a comics anthology that had nothing but humor strips in it, and Nick Mag is the closest thing we have to that at the moment. I honestly can't thing of a better way of getting kids to love comics than this magazine: it's appealing to both genders, it's funny, it's attractive to look at (they don't skimp on production values), there's a variety of styles & stories, and it can be enjoyed without having to understand a lot of backstory.

Sardine is what I would call minor work from two excellent cartoonists, Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. . Sfar in particular is a huge favorite of mine. This collection of strips is aimed squarely at kids (even the flap on the front cover says "No Grown-Ups Allowed! (Unless they're pirates or space adventurers)"). In these stories, Sardine the space pirate travels with Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie, having all sorts of adventures. They're in constant combat with the villainous Supermuscleman and mad scientist Doc Krok, always foiling their schemes. Each story is 10 pages long, just long enough to establish a conflict and resolution.

What makes the stories fun are the absurd set-ups: a comet covered in carpet, with a ruler that tries to force its visitors to buy some; a planet filled with flies that put bad dance tunes into its victims ears, the kind you can't get out of your head; a giant with video cameras inside its body; a lonely worm that creates a spaceship in a bid to make friends that only scares them off instead. When the stories move away from the oafish Supermuscleman (who gets outsmarted by Sardine so easily that he doesn't make for much of a villain), they're much funnier and weirder. For example, Sardine and Louie are able to save their friends in a flea circus from that video giant by going inside his body and playing soccer--that's because "wherever there's soccer, there's cameras".

The comics are more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. They're in the tradition of a Carl Barks, mixing adventure and silliness. The real highlight of these stories is Sfar's loose, vibrant style. While the character designs are simple and iconic, he still manages to pack an enormous amount of detail in a given panel. This makes his pages easy to follow (some of them have only two panels) but rewarding to look at. The use of color is another major component of the overall visual impact; they're kept bright, basic and even a bit garish. These stories occur in a fantastic world, and their non-naturalistic look and feel adds to the effect.

The main criticism I'd have of this collection is that there's a certain repetitiveness to the stories. Every story details some adventure or misadventure of Sardine and her friends, often against the same set of opponents. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's formulaic, but there's a sense of diminishing returns the further one gets into the book, even if each individual story is enjoyable on its own. From a child's standpoint, this probably isn't a big deal--if they like the stories to begin with. Unlike the Nick Mag, with its wide range of styles, this Sardine volume is best given to children who are already inclined to enjoy this sort of story.

The audience for Blindspot is entirely different, and not just because of the 9-and-over target group. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Dean, who retreats into army fantasies as a way of dealing with the alienation he feels in relating with other kids, his family's constant moving around, and the difficulty he has in dealing with authority. The irony is that he chose war and army scenarios as a symbol of rugged freedom, when the military is the ultimate form of regimentation. The key is that his understanding of war is what he reads in comic books, and these fantasies inform his playtime with his friends. Eventually, a frightening encounter with a homeless man snaps him out of his war fantasies.

What makes the book more than a routine exploration of pre-adolescent problems is the masterful use of color. Pyle employed single-color palettes during every real-life sequence, but his use of color was non-naturalistic. He used green (army soldier green) during every sequence where Dean and his friends were playing army in the forest, and used it once again towards the end to reflect a significant change for Dean. He used a light lilac to depict winter, but more importantly, a time of reflection and an attempt at understanding. An aqua-green represented times of crisis in school, or a sequence where he had to go to a child psychologist. Light blue represented both night and the sense of elation that turned into panic when he was faced with a homeless man angry at him and his friends for destroying his hovel--but really wanting someone to unload the story of his own life's misery on. Brown seemed to represent the times when Dean was most grounded in reality. Sometimes this was because of family difficulties, and other times because he was finally able to exult a bit in enjoying himself as a kid in the here and now. There are other shades for other encounters as well, but these were the ones that stood out.

The stand-out stylization that Pyle used came when Dean was deep in his army fantasies in his friends. The art would shift from the simple palette to one resembling old war comics--flat and four-colored, looking a bit like Joe Kubert or Dick Ayers 60's war comics. It was no accident that these sequences (meshing the kids' "play" dialogue into something resembling the dialogue from such comics) had color that was comparatively more vibrant, but in no sense was it meant to be realistic. In a later scene where Dean is at the psychologist's office, he slips into fantasy mode, with the page drawn like Dean's a soldier being interrogated. As Dean relaxes and realizes that there's no threat here, the fantasy fades and we him going back to a more realistic view of the situation.

Dean felt trapped as a child, and the forest where he played represented freedom. The life of a soldier as he saw it in the forest was the ultimate form of liberation: living on your own wits and toughness, righting wrongs, performing tasks that meant something. Being punished for doing poorly in school didn't mean anything to him. What slowly started to change him was seeing images of the Holocaust in a library book; the images of dead bodies started to interfere even with his war fantasies. While that shifted his fantasies, it didn't change his desire for solitude and self-determination. That didn't change until the homeless man (who boasted about his freedom) revealed the devastating details of his miserable life. Dean was finally able to leave that fantasy behind after that as his parents rescued him from the forest and he came to see them, and his life, in a very different light. He understood that there was a thin line between freedom and alienation, and how easy it was to cross that line.

The whole sequence with the homeless man is heralded by a typically clever use of color. Right before that, Dean was out with his friends, having fun on Halloween. He was just a normal kid, and it felt good. This was highlighted by the use of brown in this scene. After he says goodbye to his friends, we suddenly shift to light blue, with only a slight red-brown in the sky as the sun sets. It's the only time in the book that colors are mixed on a non-fantasy page, and here we see the warm feelings represented by brown start to fade into the ominous blue of the night, panel by panel. It's a transition significant enough to make up the bulk of the book's cover.

The understanding that Dean's change in his self was apparent when we see him playing baseball and the color is back to that army-green. Chasing a long fly ball, Dean is faced with his fantasy forest again, probably for the first time. He's finally come to terms with what it represented to him, and he was literally able to turn his back to it and move on. This point is hammered home in the book's final sequence, where Dean's family has moved again. In brown tones, he meets some new kids and befriends them, telling them that army play is "kid's stuff". It's perhaps a bit too obvious a cue after so much subtlety in this book, the only wrong turn in a comic filled with so many right choices.

Blindspot rewards multiple readings as one begins to absorb and understand Pyle's use of color and the subtle shifts in the story's tone as a result. Rite-of-passage fiction is a genre that's been mined quite deeply, but Pyle's sensitivity, skill and cleverness make this book a uniquely rewarding experience. I would recommend it in particular to junior high school students, especially boys.

Sequart Reprints: Klezmer

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2006.

Continuing my look at First Second's fall line of books, Joann Sfar's Klezmer is the best of the bunch. Sfar is a master of characterization, creating fully-formed and intriguing people out of thin air. While his narratives are basically just an excuse to have his characters interact, it doesn't matter because his witty dialogue creates a very smooth flow from page to page. His sketchy art is accentuated by his bright and sometimes vulgar watercolor stylings, creating an expressionist atmosphere for his characters. While there’s a certain exuberance on each page, Sfar does put his characters through some rough times. This leads to a bit of excitement on the page as well as philosophical reflection by his protagonists.

The setting here is Eastern Europe after a war. A group of ex-soldiers turned klezmer musicians is gunned down by a rival band. Klezmer essentially is a Jewish variation of blues: an uptempo, rhythmic music that frequently centers around one's misfortunes and tribulations but also on small joys. It's party music, soul music, and money could be made from performing it. That's why a band that served a particular village killed a traveling band even though they were all fellow Jews: this was a gig no one wanted to give up.

The lone surviving member of the original band exacts a form of musical revenge in a memorable scene, and one by one we're introduced to what would become the foundation for a new band. We meet a young man thrown out of his yeshiva for stealing a coat, a woman fleeing her small village because she doesn’t want to get married, a gypsy who comes close to dying at the hands of a lynch mob, and a twitchy ex-student who plays the violin while sleepwalking. Along the way, Sfar has his characters leisurely discuss scapegoating (both of Jew and Gypsy), the alienation that small town life can produce, what it means to be a Jew, and above all the joy of music. The book ends on a cliffhanger, as the newly formed band (after several of them threaten to kill each other) is offered a gig that’s too good to turn down.

The use of color is what makes the book so visually appealing, especially when he applies it non-naturalistically. Instead, color reflects mood, atmosphere and a sense of danger or excitement. Sfar doesn’t overdo it, interspersing the brighter segments with extended scenes in snowy forests. He saves his most vivid colors for scenes at night, especially when his characters are performing. Color is a key to how he manages to depict music on the page.

I have a particular interest in comics about music and am interested to see how each author solves the problem of how to portray sound in a silent medium. Sfar is aided by having characters teaching each other new songs or how to play an instrument in the first place, so there’s extensive use of onomatopoeia. Beyond that, Sfar manages to convey the camaraderie amongst musicians, and this is truly what’s at the heart of the book. The most intriguing character is Yaacov, the former student who’s thrown out of school. That rejection, despite the fact that he was a Talmudic prodigy, leads him to renounce his faith. An encounter with a group of blind believers in a cave is part of a fascinating sequence that reveals while he may be done with being a Jew, Judaism wasn’t quite done with him. Sfar reveals in his notes that Yaacov is in fact a variation of the cat from his excellent The Rabbi's Cat, and that the characters here are the flipside of the religious, studious Jews from that story. The cast of Klezmer have either abandoned or been thrown out of the environments that were central to their faiths and cultures. Becoming musicians was both a way of establishing a new community while still maintaining (even grudgingly or exploitatively) their connections to their old culture.

Sfar speaks to the idea of ethnic vs. religious Judaism in his comments, and the whole purpose of telling a story about a klezmer band was done in order to talk about the memories of particular strains of Jews that no longer exists. In many ways, the book is about its setting and milieu as it is the main characters; the city of Odessa in particular is vivid and exciting. Playing klezmer today is a way of honoring and sharing old memories and stories and doing this across cultures.

New Review @TCJ: Dungeon Monstres, V 4

Over at The Comics Journal, a review has been posted of Dungeon Monstres, Volume 4, by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Jean-Emmanuel Vermot-Desroches, and Yoann.

Dream Team: Dungeon The Early Years, Volume 2

Rob reviews the second volume translation of the Dungeon: The Early Years, by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar and Christophe Blain (NBM).

Twenty-four volumes of the various DUNGEON books have been translated into English by the stalwarts at NBM, reprinted at smaller size in twelve editions. That leaves thirteen volumes still to be translated, with the Trondheim/Sfar team at this point writing the books and leaving the art to a variety of people. In addition to the three main storylines (Early Years, Zenith and Twilight), most of the untranslated volumes are in the miscellaneous "Monsters" category--stories that fill in cracks between other stories. Trondheim and Sfar love playing around with time jumping; indeed, in this translated edition, we go from volume -97 (of a lighthearted series that began at -99, reflecting the "early" notion of this story) to volume -84. That second story, "After The Rain", is a much more grim depiction of our hero, Hyacinthe, the future Dungeon keeper of the Zenith books.

One of my favorite trends in comics over the past five years has been the concerted effort made to translate Sfar and Trondheim's work into English and the way in which audiences have responded. Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics tried to do this a decade again with full-color translations of two books in the Lapinot (in English: McConey) series and then several issues of a Trondheim grab-bag series called THE NIMROD. The latter had some of Trondheim's best and most unusual work, but with the decline in the overall comics market and comics that didn't have any kind of genre-related hook, that series didn't do well. For the McConey books, it was proof that Americans just don't like the French album format. Those slice-of-life books were easily approachable and witty, but simply didn't draw readers in.

NBM took up the torch first with a black-and-white series that translated DUNGEON, ASTRONAUTS OF THE FUTURE and some McConey stories. With the rise of the graphic novel in bookstores and libraries, they switch over to smaller-format, full color translations, a strategy that has worked wonderfully. First Second came along and has translated close to a dozen works involving Trondheim or Sfar. Fantagraphics will be getting back in the game by finally publishing Trondheim's autobio classic APPROXIMATIVEMENT, most likely next year. There's still a ton of Trondheim work to be translated: VENETIAN BLIND, more LI'L SANTA, more TINY TYRANT, comics involving monsters & dinosaurs, and some more cutting-edge material. It's become clear that Trondheim & Sfar's genre material has found an audience, one that continues to grow.

A highlight of the Early Years story is the third member of this artistic dream team, Christophe Blain. With his SPEED ABATER, and ISAAC THE PIRATE books, he's proven himself as an artist who creates imaginative and exciting action scenarios. His art for DUNGEON combines the charming character design of Trondheim with a fluidity of movement that results in a work that's both funny and thrilling. Trondheim's art in the series was always better suited to more satirical stories (even when they were darker in tone), but with Blain we get the rush of adventure along with affectionate jabs at genre.

The first story in the volume, the aptly-titled "Innocence Lost", sees the ramifications of Hyacinthe's romantic dalliance with the serpentine assassin Alexandra. Manipulated into killing a man, Hyacinthe starts down a slippery slope from being a noble avenger of wrongs (as The Nightshirt) to a cynical aristocrat leading a double life as the head of the assassin's guild. Through it all, his real concern is his doomed romance, and this is another area where Blain truly excels. His GUS AND HIS GANG book was a similar mix of action and dead-end romance, and Blain was able to create pathos with a character who had been a mix of walking comic relief and hubris. The character's design, as a diminutive and cute anthropomorphic bird, made this especially challenging for Blain. By the end of the story, when we see Hyacinthe dress up in his Nightshirt outfit but see him visit Alexandra instead of going after criminals, it's clear that our protagonist has allowed his entire moral code to lapse for the sake of his love.

The second story is a much grimmer one and covers the eventual ramifications of his actions. Hyacinthe and Alexandra don't marry, and he keeps up appearances by marrying someone that his lover murders. As the story opens, the human price just paid for his double life suddenly become much clearer, and is complicated by a plot contrivance that forces him to deal with the woman he now both loves and hates. That contrivance (the potential destruction of the city thanks to faulty construction) is an entertaining side-story of its own, thanks to the almost robotic ruthlessness of Professor Cormor. He's the man trying to stop the construction who turns to Alexandra, who in turn agrees to help him if he'll help her get back with Hyacinthe. Things eventually go horribly awry, winding up with a downbeat ending that signals the beginning of what would become Hyacinthe's rule as the Dungeon Keeper.

This volume marked the first time I wished that NBM could have kept the larger page format. There are some spectacular action scenes that felt cramped shrunk down to a smaller size, and other pages crammed with panels that felt similarly claustrophobic. A lot of darker colors were used in this volume, which made those pages feel a bit muddy at times as well. In an ideal world, we'd get an "absolute edition" of DUNGEON on oversized pages and nice paper, but as a reader I'm grateful that we're getting this much Trondheim & Sfar in English. Trondheim and Sfar have taken the series into greatness by refusing to repeat themselves and have instead upped their degree of difficulty with ever-more complex plots and nuanced characterizations. DUNGEON has gone from being a bit of a lark to one of the greatest genre series of all time, affectionately spoofing and celebrating not just fantasy, but the investment of a reader into a world of fantasy.

Knots Tying Knots: Dungeon Zenith, Volume 3

Rob reviews the latest collection of translations from the DUNGEON: ZENITH series, BACK IN STYLE (volume 3), by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar and Boulet (NBM).

The third volume of the english translation of DUNGEON has been long-awaited, but I wouldn't recommend reading it until one has reread the first two volumes. The saga becomes increasingly plot-heavy here and immediately follows the events of the last volume. There are some ways in which the fantasy send-up/homage by Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar reminds me a bit of Jeff Smith's BONE. Both started their series on extremely lighthearted notes and spent a number of pages carefully establishing character relationships. Once Smith spent a couple of years doing that, it was off to the races with a quest, action scenes, plot twists and the like. He had earned his audience's trust before he simply shipped his characters all off into their wars by carefully but casually dropping mysterious clues as well as seeing them interact in a mundane matter. We knew each character's quirks, desires and loves as well as the ways in which they interacted with each other, which made the conflicts they wound up later all the more involving.

DUNGEON's first volume (with each volume collecting two of the original French albums) introduces us to an anthropomorphic duck named Herbert and a peculiar lizard named Marvin. Herbert's a smartass dungeon flunky and Marvin's a fierce but quirky warrior, and the whims of fate throw them together. Their hijinks manage to simultaneously parody sword 'n sorcery stories while at the same time put together a startlingly intricate, straight-faced fantasy epic. Seemingly trivial or even farcical details from these stories either have complicated backstories (explored in the Early Years stories) or have serious ramifications in later years (as detailed in the Twilight stories). The "main" narrative, or the "Zenith" story, mixes humor with action, making neither seem out of place.

That said, there's a certain grimness to be found in the two stories in BACK IN STYLE where one can begin to see how Herbert and Marvin wind up in such dire circumstances in the future. That's felt in the Keeper being kicked out of his own dungeon at the end of the first story (after a series of cleverly designed action pieces that ramped up the tension and the stakes in succession) and Herbert returning to his home city and finding a deadly welcome in the second. Both stories have a downbeat, uncertain ending--a far cry from the more neatly tied-off story threads in earlier volumes. Despite the intricacies of the plot, building on dozens of story developments from prior volumes, these stories work because of the way Sfar & Trondheim found every aspect of the story on character relationships.

Herbert and Marvin are obviously the foundational relationship of the series, but the interactions between Herbert and his oily nemesis Delacor established a delightful, mutual aggravation. Delacor's general sliminess (hiring a lawyer to seize the dungeon) made him a source of friction for everyone he encountered. The ass-kicking princess, Isis, was another interesting catalyst in the way she prodded Herbert and moved so easily in the company of thieves. The dungeon Keeper himself emerges as a sympathetic character, taking on a paternal quality to his minions when he realized he was about to lose it all. Herbert's parents are introduced in this volume, and their complicated relationship with him adds another layer of intrigue to what was once a seemingly simple parody character. Even seemingly incidental characters like the postman Pollyplume, a sad sack thrust willingly into an exciting new life, add
new perspectives to the saga.

The most startling change to be found in this volume is that Trondheim passed on the art duties to Boulet. For the most part, Boulet stays faithful to the character design that Trondheim established. However, the quality of his line is much slicker and clearer than Trondheim's slightly ramshackle line. The effect is a jarring one; the idiosyncratic nature of Trondheim's art was a perfect fit for the slightly off-kilter nature of a saga that was half serious and half joking. Boulet doesn't really try to make funny drawings; even ridiculous scenes have a slickness to them that takes a while to get used to. I almost would have preferred an artist try a completely different approach (like in the Dungeon: Monstres side-series) than this sort of hybrid approach. That said, Boulet did quickly master drawing a cast of thousands and really is a master at propelling adventure stories forward. The sequence where Herbert and his friends escape from a tavern by taking to the rooftops and eventually flying away was a particular highlight, a spectacular and visceral set of panels that perfectly balance drama and wisecracks.

Despite missing Trondheim's line, the Sfar/Trondheim duo did not disappoint in this latest volume, taking crazy story risks and throwing in plot twists and character reversals at the drop of a hat. DUNGEON remains my favorite genre-related series of all time, and anything that helps new volumes appear more quickly is fine by me. If Boulet is going to be the regular artist for Zenith from now on, it'll be interesting to see how he adjusts his style in future volumes.

The Details of Armageddon: DUNGEON MONSTRES VOLUME 2Lew

Rob reviews the latest collection of stories from Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's DUNGEON series, DUNGEON MONSTRES VOL 2: THE DARK LORD (NBM).

Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar are two of my favorite cartoonists in the world, in part because of the dizzyingly broad range of subjects they're interested in. Trondheim's work ranges from abstract, conceptual comics to slice-of-life to autobio to children's books to rip-roaring adventure. He automatically becomes one of the best artists in any genre he chooses to work in, and fantasy comics are no exception. He and Sfar didn't just choose to create a lark of a series to affectionately parody fantasy and role-playing tropes in DUNGEON, they wanted to create a genuinely involving story that worked on multiple levels. They wanted the adventure aspects of the story to be simultaneously exciting and silly as they built an entire world, Tolkein-style. As such, they set out a plan to tell the story of the titular dungeon in its glory days (the "Zenith" stories), to tell the story of its origins (the "Early Years" stories) and its downfall ("Twilight")--and planned to write a hundred volumes in each series!

If that plan wasn't ambitious enough, there are also side volumes that tell smaller, funny stories of the main characters ("Parade") and volumes that focus in on particular characters at particular times ("Monstres"). DUNGEON manages to be the rare series that is simultaneously complex and simple to follow, zeroing in on a few characters over time and expanding the cast from there. It's by far my favorite genre-related series of all time, enjoyable on every level. Of course, given the scope of this project (which they may never complete), Sfar & Trondheim have recruited a number of different artists to step in to draw the stories. NBM is reprinting each series two volumes at a time, and DUNGEON MONSTRES 2 is the latest edition. This volume features art by Andreas, known for his Lovecraftian horror stories, and Stephane Blanquet, an artist who specializes in the grotesque.

Both artists are inspired choices. In the first story, "The Great Map", Andreas' horror background is merged with the funny animal character design aa we follow the rabbit warrior Marvin the Red on a quest. The story does get a bit confusing if you haven't read the Twilight stories, so I'd recommend brushing up on those volumes so as to avoid confusion. That said, the
specifics of the quest are less important than Marvin's confusing love life, somehow trying to simultaneously pitch woo to two very different women at the same time. Marvin is one of the best characters in the entire series: a young warrior oblivious to the larger events of the world naively seeking glory. His single-mindedness in the face of total chaos is both exciting and hilarious, as he's both hero and comic relief.

The second story, "The Dark Lord", is drawn by Blanquet. His style is so distinctive that it was impossible to completely subsume within Trondheim's character design. This wound up working out quite nicely, as his monsters were especially gross and the violence especially visceral. This story follows what happened after the downfall of Herbert, the duck hero of Zenith who had become corrupted by power in later years. This story gives us a number of important details as to exactly how Herbert wound up in such a horrible position (he wound up being possessed by a dark entity connected to various objects of power he had collected) and follows him as he cleverly gets out of one near-death experience after another. Following such a haunted character after focusing in on such a naive character like Marvin was an interesting contrast, and I especially like the way that Trondheim & Sfar connected the two stories, telling them from different points of view. Any fan of Trondheim and Sfar should be reading DUNGEON, and any fan of DUNGEON should probably pick up every volume. This volume was an unexpected visual feast that was still entirely within the sensibilities of its writers.