By Gazzotti & Vehlmann, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBNs: 978-1-849181-96-9 (PB Album/Digital edition vol 1) 978-1-84918-206-5 (PB Album/Digital edition vol 2)
These books include potentially Discriminatory Content produced for dramatic effect.
Fabien Vehlmann was born in 1972 yet his prodigious canon of work (from 1998 to the present) has earned him the soubriquet of “the Goscinny of the 21st Century”. He entered the world in Mont-de-Marsan and grew up in Savoie, growing up to study business management before taking a job with a theatre group. In 1996, after entering a writing contest in Le Journal de Spirou, he caught the comics bug. Two years later with illustrative collaborator Denis Bodart he published a mordantly quirky, sophisticated portmanteau period crime comedy entitled Green Manor. From there on his triumphs grew to include – amongst many others – Célestin Speculoos for Circus, Nicotine Goudron for L’Écho des Savanes, The Marquis of Anaon and major-league property Spirou and Fantasio…
Bruno Gazzotti is Belgian, born in 1970 and was a student of Institut Saint Luc in Liège. Another artist addicted to comics from his earliest years, he started being paid to draw them in 1988, after being hired by Le Journal de Spirou editor Patrick Pinchart on the strength of his portfolio alone. Before long he was illustrating Le Petit Spirou with Tome & Janry. In 1989, he and Tome created New York Cop Soda, which kept Gazzotti busy until 2005, when he resigned to co-create award-winning feature Seuls…
Alone volume 1: The Vanishing
Released in January 2006, Seuls – La disparition is a superb example of a kids’ thriller suitable for all ages: evoking the eerie atmosphere of TV series Lost, with notes of modern phenomenon Stranger Things and the most disturbing elements of Philip Wylie’s novel The Disappearance and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Translated as The Vanishing, the first chapter show glimpses of an ordinary bustling town, with simple folk going about their business. Our swift peeping settles on a cross section of kids: Ivan, an imaginative child of wealth who wants for nothing but never sees his dad anymore and Leila, a born engineer, inventor and tinkerer. Her poor but honest dad always has time to play and favourably critique her latest gadget…
Camille is studious and over-focussed on exams and achievement and Terry is pretty much still a baby. He certainly acts like one, trying to stay up late, binge watching TV and throwing tantrums if he doesn’t get his way. Sadly, not all the children in town have such typical lives. Dodzi has just been taken into the social care system. His early life has made him tough and resilient but won’t stop other young inmates handing him a beating on this ominous, odd-feeling portentous night…
Morning dawns overcast and forbidding. The city is quiet. Roaming empty streets, Dodzi calls out to anyone who can hear and is met – actually run over – by Leila and Terry on her bike. They are all pretty scared and have seen nobody else at all…
No one else is around. All the adults are gone, and every kid they know. The internet is down, television and radio only roar out static. Above, fearsome ponderous storm clouds gather. Within minutes fear turns to panic and violence before, eventually, Dodzi brutally enforces calm and leads them away, only to stumble into Camille being attacked by a dog. As the tough guy tries to fight it off, the rabid beast senses something in the shadows of an alley and bolts away…
As the youngsters wander, someone watches the shocked, scared waifs, and after they joyously blow off steam in a fountain, they meet final lost boy Ivan. He invites them back to his mansion at the edge of town where they find food while being subjected to his theories on what’s happened… everything from a shared dream to an extinction event to the possibility that they’re dead and in hell…
Needing more information, Dodzi and Leila try to drive one of many cars on the estate while the smaller kids sort out a proper meal. Neither task goes well. The cooking is a disaster while the near-lethal reconnaissance only reveals more empty streets, wrecked shop fronts and wild animals roaming the avenues and alleys. While the motoring minors seek to evade two rhinos, Terry and Camille are nearly eaten by a white tiger that’s got through the estate gates! When Dodzi and Leila return – and following a burst of viciously released tensions – the kids modify and weaponize a 4-by-4 and head back into town. Ivan’s dad owns the tallest building in the city: somewhere stuffed with crucial resources and a place easily fortified and defended…
As the first day alone ends, the kids are bloated with vending machine snacks and playing in the vast office block’s upper reaches, but de facto leader Dodzi is still uneasy. When Leila reports tiny Terry is missing, the notional “man-in-charge” heads out to search, finding to his horror where all those animals came from: a scene of destruction that distracts Dodzi enough that a hidden stalker almost takes him. Naturally, the others have completely ignored his orders and followed, so it isn’t Dodzi who dies…
Thus begins a spooky, powerful and often shocking tale of mystery and imagination with bereft children facing increasingly daunting physical hazards and an escalating series of events which can have no logical or rational explanation…
To Be Continued…
Alone volume 2: The Master of Knives
Debut volume The Vanishing showed an ordinary bustling town rendered an empty mausoleum overnight, with a small cross-section of kids left to survive or die. When it happened, the mystified minors wandered a terrifyingly quiet, suddenly unfamiliar environment until finding each other and the relief of “bad kid” Dodzi who reluctantly took responsibility for their staying alive. Adults were gone, all outside contact severed and wild beasts stalked them so Dodzi brutally enforced calm and lead them away to find a succession of temporary – albeit palatial – refuges to regroup and think. Encounters with escaped circus animals resulted in the little band settling in the towering Majestic Hotel to await whatever came next…
Originally released as Seuls: Le Maître des couteaux in 2007, The Master of Knives opens with Dodzi scouting the vacant metropolis and helping Leila consolidate supplies for a long stay in the lap of luxury. His nervousness remains high as close calls with the liberated beasts in the streets come continually, but the younger children seem to be adapting well. It certainly helps that they are hoarding every toy and treat they find in abandoned shops and houses. Ivan has a plan to occupy him too: systematically calling every telephone number in the phone book. No luck yet, though…
Things start to go south swiftly after he finds his father’s pistol and tempts Leila into a spot of rooftop target practice. When Dodzi furiously confiscates the lethal plaything, he has no idea that he has now become the preferred prey of a mystery stalker. As this masked pursuer enacts a chilling campaign of terror, stressed-out Dodzi agonisingly learns that he is not the only obsession of the terrifying, nebulous cloaked figure draped in blades and daggers…
While the others obliviously fritter away the day, pressure-laden Dodzi is remorselessly hunted over rooftops by the manic killer. When he briefly eludes the hunter, the Master simply doubles back to menace the children in the hotel. Ultimately a shocking confrontation ensues, with the tables turned… but only at the cost of Dodzi’s closely withheld shameful secrets being exposed to all…
In the painful aftermath, the days of innocence are discarded and the orphan family prepares to hit the open road to see if other cities have been emptied too…
To Be Continued…
This spooky, powerful, frequently shocking tale of mystery and imagination sees bereft children facing increasingly daunting physical hazards and an escalating series of events which apparently have no logical or rational explanation. Tension and terror inexorably amplifies with every instalment – just like the real world at the moment.
Alone – running to 12 translated volumes thus far of a projected 14 – was one of the biggest critical and commercial comics hits of the last decade (more than 2 million copies sold!). Seuls even made it to the big screen in 2017, so if you love eerie enigmas and powerful tale-telling, you’ll soon be buying this, you’ll buy these and successive releases to know why…
© Dupuis 2006 and 2007 by Gazzotti & Vehlmann. All rights reserved. English translation © 2014 Cinebook Ltd.
Today in 1912, Terry and the Pirates crafter George Wunder (officially in charge from December 30, 1946 to 1973) was born, followed in 1930 by filmmaker and occasional Superman comics scripter Richard Donner. That same year cartoonist/children’s book illustrator Howie (Eek & Meek) Schneider arrived. In Canada in 1957, small press maven John McLeod (Dishman, Space Kid) joined the party, as did superhero/cover star J.G. Jones in 1962.
This date in 1981 we lost the great Howard Purcell (Sargon the Sorcerer, Green Lantern, Gay Ghost, Mister District Attorney, Enchantress, Sea Devils, Nick Fury, Black Knight, DC mystery and Sci Fi anthologies) and in 2004 comics author and scripter Nat Gertler initiated the first 24-hour comics day.