To The Last Page

Although he has moved on quite a bit from his early Lapinot adventures and autobiographical strips for the indie publisher L’Association, Lewis Trondheim’s comic work can still usually be counted on for a few reliable qualities. One is sharp writing and characterisation, there’s always a great sense of humour in his work and a hunger to try something new, meaning that you could never predict what he would do next. Not willing to even be restricted by his own limited – but brilliant – artistic style for cartoony anthromorphic characters, Trondheim will just as happily provide the scripts and enjoy the collaboration of other artists. Karmela Krimm , like his recent script for Stéphane Oiry on Maggy Garrisson , is the kind of material that needs an artist with a feel for the subject of inner city life and crime. Much like Maggy’s London – although in some ways also in complete contrast – Trondheim and Franck Biancarelli have in Karmela Krimm‘s Marseille a location that provides plenty of ...

It was always going to be interesting to see where Jon McGregor would go after the stripped back minimalism of his last novel. One of the foremost UK writers from his extraordinary debut novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things , McGregor had been honing his style through subsequent books, gradually removing any trace of style, poetic flourishes and even any sense of authorial directing of a narrative to try and get closer to expressing truth in his writing. This culminated in the stark but fascinating beauty of Reservoir 13 . Lean Fall Stand does seem like it is indeed teetering but ready to pull back from the edge, as if the previous experiment in minimalist writing was a little step too far and in fact maybe even still be seems as a kind of stylisation in its approach. Here rather the book opens with a tense sense of drama as three men on a geographical mapping research expedition in Antarctica get caught up in a sudden and dangerous violent storm. Luke and Thomas however ha...

Revisionism and new dark origins for long-running characters have been all the rage in American comics since the mid-to-late eighties, redefining superheroes to reflect the rather more serious reality of the times we are living in. The classic French series appear to have avoided that up to now, but in reality it’s been done in more subtle ways with each team bringing something new and of the time, whether it’s through Blutch taking on Tif et Tondu ( Mop and Mopus ) or Emile Bravo reconsidering the origins of Spirou in the context of the war years in which the series originated. You would probably think that Marsupilami is no more likely for dark origin revisionism than Mickey Mouse, but here are Zidrou and Frank Pé with Marsupilami, The Beast . Marsupilami was created by André Franquin during the most famous run of Belgian children’s comic book series Spirou in the 1950s and 60s. Something seemingly part leopard and part long-tail monkey – Marsupilami is an essentially harmless crea...

From the mushroom spore and fungus infected world of Ambergris to the mysterious dangerous zones of the Southern Reach trilogy that spread and distort reality, the visions of Jeff VanderMeer are strange and, quite literally, in a world of their own. As the originator of a new genre that you could call eco-noir, each of those series has an detective/investigator acting as a guide for the reader as they try to make sense of the peculiar nature of a changing world. That’s much the format of the mystery of VanderMeer’s latest standalone (but who can ever know) novel, Hummingbird Salamander , a near-future novel that grapples with issues of climate change, natural disasters, animal extinction and pandemic crises, all interconnected and wrapped up in an abstract noir mystery that needs to be unravelled ultimately for the greater good of all mankind. Jane Smith is not actually a detective but she is involved in security. Although she is a former body-builder, she actually works as an IT secur...