I love wasting a Saturday afternoon reading comic books. Lately I've been getting into reading bandes dessinées. It's so fucking embarrassing, like being a weeaboo for Belgium. Anyway, these are the ones I've read:
Le Chemin du Couchant / The Sunset Trail
by Tisselli & Corteggiani
There was a time I'd've been really interested in something like this, historical fiction set in Canada from an outsider's perspective.
Ultimately though, I found it ugly, taking the perspective of the cowboys and indians westerns of the 40s and 50s. It admits Riel and Gabriel Dumont were in the right, and tries to have a 3:10 to Yuma-type ending with a temporary reconciliation between two sides, but in the end it's still a comic about a Mountie hunting down an indigenous person.
I think the art would appeal to people who buy wolf photography at the mall.
Irons Volume 1: The Engineer
by Luc Brahy & Tristan Roulot
Meet Jack Irons, concrete engineer. He doesn't care about justice... only concrete. And his current mystery is an explosion that rocks the Confederation Bridge which connects Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.
This one's even worse because I can kind of see why someone would be misguided enough to find Canada's past exotic and full of adventure. I get like that myself sometimes. But the Confederation Bridge? Come on.
The concrete and engineering stuff seems really well researched from what I can tell.
The Prince Edwards Islanders use Quebec curse words which is very funny. Irons gets in a fight with a fisherman who has a fleur-de-lis tattooed to his head. In true maritime fashion the real villain is a fishermen wrecking their own boat for the insurance money.
Asgard Volume 1: Ironfoot & Asgard Volume 2: The World Serpent
by Xavier Dorison and Meyer Ralph
Historical fantasy where both the story and the art come alive through the attention to detail. This absolutely ruled. Viking outcast goes hunting an eel monster in the fjords. Fantastic ending, beautiful art. Simple, straightforward tale. Loved every page of it.
Kobane Calling
by Zerocalcare
Imagine Italian Brace Belden but instead of a podcaster he's a comic book memoirist. So far only the first volume has been translated to English, but it's pretty good, it deals with his decision to go to Rojava and help the Kurds build Democratic Confederalism and fight ISIS.
Thorgal
by Jean Van Hamme and Grzegorz Rosiński
This is the big one, it absolutely rules. So get this, Thorgal is this baby on a spaceship and he accidentally gets launched in an escape pod when fighting breaks out on the ship. He gets picked up by some vikings
who raise him as one of their own and he never really learns about his heritage except that he has a weird pendant or something who cares.
He goes on viking adventures that sometimes have science fiction elements (a time travel story, a survivor from the shipwreck who sets himself up as a warlord with his space helmet) and sometimes have high fantasy elements (longships carried by hot air balloons over a jungle, his wife gets kidnapped to a fortress on a high cliff––like a really high cliff). But it's the viking stuff that rules the most. The series started in the late 70s and is still going strong, with spinoffs featuring Thorgal's wife, kids, enemies, etc. I'm going to do a separate post on just how much Thorgal rules.
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