By Andreas (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-150-6
To me a great comic strip begins with the simple line. The greatest drawing is always about the power of black against white. Colour enhances but it seldom creates. For my money, one of the best line artists in the business is the modern fantasist Andreas.
Andreas Martens is an incredibly versatile artist born in East Germany (from a time when that meant another country not a different location), trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels. His work has appeared in Le 9e Rêve, and Tintin where in conjunction with his teacher Eddie Paape he created the seminal Udolfo.
Andreas has adapted the works of Francois Rivière (collected as Révélations Posthumes in 1980) and produced a graphic edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for Je Bouquine. Among his many original efforts are Raffington Detective, Cyrrus, Arq and a host of others. All his works are steeped in classical style, draped in period glamour and drenched in visual tension. Many are thematically linked. But before all these he created one of the most stylish and memorable “challengers of The Unknown” in horror fiction with the introduction and continuing adventures of the enigmatic psychic savant Rork.
His pale and moody hero, (who debuted in Pilote in 1978) draws on the tone and sometimes content of dark-fantasists August Derleth, H. P. Lovecraft and especially the Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson; traveling the world and the great beyond unraveling great mysteries and discovering startling wonders not for fame or glory but because he must…
In the early 1990s Dark Horse Comics serialized his adventures in their superb anthology of European comics Cheval Noir, and those translations formed the basis of a little seen or remarked upon series of albums from NBM. This volume is a particular favourite of mine (even if the spine and binding are less than robust), featuring two tales in a continuing story arc as the ethereal knowledge-seeker is returned to Earth from a Transcendent Realm to intervene in the inevitably grisly fate of a scientific expedition in the wilds of Central America.
Douglas Holbein was obsessed with the story of The Chavesians, an order of architectural mystics declared heretical by the Spanish Inquisition and banished to the New World by Queen Isabella. The centuries-old sect, which built the great churches of Christendom, did not die in the harsh jungles, but continued the craft, erecting monolithic buildings in the lush wilderness, ever-seeking to learn the secrets of God through their vast stone Faith Machines.
Now Holbein’s team have found the site of the ‘Graveyard of Cathedrals’ they accidentally disrupt a centuries-old truce between the sect’s last adherents with potentially catastrophic consequences and only the reality-shocked Rork can save them…
Following his harrowing return Rork is summoned to the deserts of Mexico by mysterious means to aid an old friend atoning for her past sins in an isolated and ancient pueblo. Increasingly endangered by a jealous Medicine Man, the woman called Low Valley cares for the Indians of the settlement as she awaits a certain lunar conjunction. The swift-approaching night when ‘Starlight’ again rains down on the people promises – or perhaps warns of – radical transformation when the heavens flare again. But the impoverished and desperate people must be made to remember that not all change is good…
Exotic, chilling and lyrically beguiling, the classical mysticism and otherwordly dread of these tales is a continuously heady and captivating brew, especially with the intense, linear illustration and stark design of Andreas to mesmerize and shock your widened eyes. This series should be at the top of the publisher’s list of books to re-release…
© 1996 Le Lombard. English translation © 1992 Dark Horse.