Confidence in couple relationships, incursion into a mysterious village, tumultuous return to the memories of a love of youth and the end of the digital world… The duty offers you four comic strips with various themes to discover.
To stay is to die a little
For his second work of fiction entitled Farewell sad love, Mirion Malle, author of comic strips of French origin, but a Montrealer by adoption, is interested, with tact and sensitivity, in the theme of trust in the couple relationship.
What we are dealing with here is a very simple, almost banal story, in which Malle stages a main character, Cléo, also a comic book author of French origin living in Montreal. She finds herself confronted with a situation from the past, which taints her couple relationship with Charles: this one would have been rather heavy with a former classmate while they were, she and he, still studying. However, as is often the case, everyone seems aware of what would have really happened except Cleo, who is only trying to understand why her instinct tells her that it may be more serious than the typical case. of a rejected lover who exaggerates a little on the text messages… In short, the versions do not stick and it is annoying.
Then follows an introspection that allows Cléo to leave behind her own baggage and, in the process, to perhaps discover who she really is.
A story, therefore, which is based on particularly well-crafted dialogues, a clear cut and without desire to revolutionize the genre, all supported by a totally expressive design, bordering on caricature.
Brief, clear and all in subtlety with a finish which can be guessed a few pages before the end.
An agonizing return to earth
After having dabbled in video games and illustration, Jeik Dion was particularly noted for his work on the series Turbo Kidinspired by the film of the same name, as well as for his collaboration with the author Patrick Senécal for the particularly successful adaptation, in comics, of his novel Aliss in 2020.
For his first solo album, black songDion has decided to stay the course and continues to navigate, for our great pleasure, in the dark waters of the agonizing supernatural by taking us on a disturbing return to earth, in the Quebec terroir of the late 1970s.
The premise? A couple, made up of Dan, a comic book author, and Jeannine, who is a writer, decide to go live in a house which she has just inherited in order to each create their great work. Unfortunately for them, the village where they land, with its inhabitants who are all single, is cause for fear.
Particularly inspired by the early works of Stephen King – we are thinking here of his series of short stories entitled night-shiftpublished precisely in 1978 —, Dion succeeds with enough accuracy in creating a distressing universe, without ever revealing to us what is really going on, constantly letting a mystery hover, weighed down by a rough drawing (this is a quality here) and nervous , carried by a filthy line at will.
To be read with a flashlight, under the duvet.
fire and water
For the third volume of his excellent trilogy set in Melvile, a fictional village that could be located both in Estrie and in the northeastern United States, the Belgian author Romain Renard, who is also a musician, maintains the rhythm in this quite successful conclusion, which has nothing to envy to the best TV series of the genre that we can see on streaming platforms.
In The story of Ruth Jacob, Renard depicts a radio host forced to return to this village doomed to flooding, after it was decided to build a dam there. He must therefore go and liquidate the last business of his deceased grandmother and sign some papers. Obviously, it’s not that simple, when he finds himself immersed in a teenage love affair that ended badly, and we quickly understand that his summer lover would have died in a fire. But what really happened that summer?
The drawings are beautifully dark and the story prevents us from putting the album down, which we have to finish in one go.
Slowly but surely
This is an expression that perfectly characterizes the third volume of the science fiction series Bugstarted by the master of the genre, the Frenchman Enki Bilal, the first part of which was published in 2017.
We will remember that Bug depicts a kind of end of the digital world, in 2041, when all computer systems on earth cease to function. In parallel, there is this central character, Kameron Obb, an astronaut who finds himself infested by a mysterious alien parasite.
For this somewhat transitory episode, Bilal depicts women struggling with an Orwellian international political contest as the world tries to reorganize itself, in addition to allowing himself a few satirical points with regard to the woke, for example. The whole is coated with this cold, nervous and hard line which is so particular to him. Can’t wait to see where this will take us…