Category: Historical

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Trent volume 4: The Valley of Fear


By Rodolphe & Léo, coloured by Marie-Paule Alluard, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-394-9 (Album PB/Digital edition)

Continental audiences have an abiding fascination with the mythologised American experience, whether it be the Big Sky Wild West or later eras of crime-riddled, gangster-fuelled dramas. They also have a vested historical interest in the northernmost parts of the New World which has resulted in some pretty cool graphic extravaganzas if comics are your entertainment drug of choice…

Born in Rio de Janeiro on December 13th 1944, Léo is actually Brazilian artist and storyteller Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira Filho. After attaining a degree in mechanical engineering from Puerto Alegre in 1968, he was a government employee for three years, until forced to flee the country because of his political views. While a military dictatorship ran Brazil, he lived in Chile and Argentina before illegally returning to his homeland in 1974.

To survive, he worked as a designer and graphic artist in Sao Paulo whilst creating his first comics art for O Bicho magazine. In 1981 he migrated to Paris, pursuing a career in Bande Dessinée, and found work with Pilote and L’Echo des Savanes as well as more advertising and graphics fare. His big break came when Jean-Claude Forest invited him to draw stories for Okapi, leading to regular illustration work for Bayard Presse.

In 1988 Léo began his long association with scripter and scenarist Rodolphe D. Jacquette – AKA Rodolphe. The prolific, celebrated writing partner had been a giant of comics since the 1970s: a Literature graduate who transitioned from teaching and running libraries to creating poetry and writing criticism, novels, biographies, children’s stories and music journalism.

After meeting Jacques Lob in 1975, Jacquette expanded his portfolio: writing for a vast number of strip artists in magazines ranging from Pilote and Circus to À Suivre and Métal Hurlant. Amongst his most successful endeavours are Raffini (with Ferrandez) and L’Autre Monde (Florence Magnin), but his triumphs in all genres and age ranges are too numerous to list here.

In 1991 “Rodolphe” began working with Léo on a period adventure of the “far north”. Taciturn, introspective, bleakly philosophical and driven Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Philip Trent premiered in L’Homme Mort, forging a lonely path through the 19th century Dominion generating eight tempestuous, hard-bitten, love-benighted albums between then and 2000. Their creative collaboration prompted later fantasy classic Kenya and its spin-offs Centaurus and Porte de Brazenac.

Cast very much in the classic mould perfected by Jack London and John Buchan, Trent is a man of few words, deep thoughts and unyielding principles who gets the job done whilst stifling emotional turmoil boiling deep within him: the very embodiment of the phrase “still waters run deep”…

As La Vallée de la peur, this fourth saga comes from 1995, with the solitary sentinel of justice and his faithful hound “Dog” initially absent from the scene. Instead, we see rail engineer George Petterson arriving at desolate shanty town White Pass and Rail Camp Seven. Here, navvies are laboriously hacking their way through a mountain, advancing the iron line inch by frozen inch.

It’s a strangely unsettling set-up, as Petterson finds when he moves into the cabin of the man he’s replacing as site manager. There’s an atmosphere of surly secrecy and every window of his new home has been nailed shut…

The first inclination of real trouble brewing comes as George tries to stop native labourers quitting. After two whites were injured and one of their own killed in tunnel accidents, they refuse to stay and be killed by “Hoppo”. The locals know it’s the work of a “demon-bear”, but the engineers will only admit to ordinary, natural problems and mock the silly superstitions. Nevertheless, when night falls they all bolt their doors. Every cabin has its windows nailed shut…

The account closes with reports of more accidents and problems as Mrs. Petterson completes her request to the RCMP to send someone to White Pass, which has been silent and out of touch for many days now…

Trent is assigned the mission and it’s a painful shock to meet again the woman he knows as Agnes. Years ago he had saved her – but not her beloved brother – and was given a clear invitation from her that he never acted upon. Eventually, he made his decision, travelling all the way to Providence with marriage in mind, only to learn that his Miss St. Yves had reached her own conclusion years previously…

Now she stubbornly accompanies him into unknown danger at White Pass. She is resolved to find her missing husband and Trent is wracked with indecision and other darker emotions he refuses to acknowledge…

Travelling to Fraser by train, the rescue party switches to horseback and picks up Trent’s occasional partner Mokashi. The First Nations scout also knows Agnes of old, and has his own reasons for leaving the comforts of family and civilisation, despite having already learned that Hoppo haunts Camp Seven…

After crossing the snowy beautiful wilderness – rendered as always by Leo with staggering craft and force – the riders arrive in a desolate Camp Seven with no sign of life. Seemingly abandoned, the cabins which once held more than fifty men are cold and empty, but it’s not long before Mokashi uncovers some of the former inhabitants…

As they batten down for the night in a reasonably defensible shack, the rescuers are keenly aware of eerie silence punctuated by erratic bursts of animal noise. Eventually sleep comes… until the implacable Mountie and Mokashi are roused by the sounds of an intruder furtively seeking entry…

When Trent investigates, he is ambushed by a beast out of his maddest nightmares. Barely escaping with his life, his frantic flight brings him to an even greater horror – George Petterson, more dead than alive and apparently the only survivor of a supernatural atrocity…

As dawn comes, Agnes is reunited with her husband and the lawmen begin the task of tracking what can only be an exceptionally clever and cunning beast. Trent, however, cannot shake the notion that he heard it speak as it shrugged off his rifle shots…

Tension mounts as both romantic triangle and murderous rampage bloodily converge, but even after the Mountie solves one mystery and the evacuation of George Petterson begins, there is more heartbreak and loss to come before civilisation reclaims them. And as ever, Trent is left to struggle with his solitary thoughts, loss and loneliness…

Another beguilingly introspective voyage of internal discovery, where environment and locales are as much lead characters as hero and villain, The Valley of Fear delivers mystery, epic scope, sinister suspense, action and poignant drama in a compelling concoction to satisfy any fan of widescreen cinematic crime fiction or grandiose western.
Original edition © Dargaud Editeur Paris 1993 by Rodolphe & Léo. All rights reserved. English translation © 2017 Cinebook Ltd.

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Green Manor volumes 1 & 2: Assassins and Gentleman & The Inconvenience of Being Dead


By Bodart & Vehlmann, translated by Elaine Kemp and Luke Spear (Cinebook Expresso)
ISBN: 978-1-905460-53-3 (vol. 1 Album PB) 978-1-905460-64-9 (vol. 2 Album PB)

Shared preconceptions are a wonderful toy to play with if you are a narrative creator – or reviewer. For instance, the French are generally considered more passionate than us reserved Brits (I wonder if that’s still the case?) and always eager to dole out grandiose appellations and epithets about creators, but at least they’re very seldom wrong in their acclamations.

Here’s a little Continental whimsy exploring the notion…

Fabien Vehlmann was only born in 1972 yet his prodigious canon of work (published from 1998 to the present) has earned him the soubriquet of “the Goscinny of the 21st Century”.

Vehlmann entered the world in Mont-de-Marsan and grew up in Savoie, studying 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 and two years later published – with illustrative collaborator Denis Bodart – a quirky, mordantly dark and gleefully sophisticated portmanteau period crime comedy entitled Green Manor.

The episodic, blackly funny tribute to the seamy underside of Victoriana appeared only sporadically until 2005 (and was revived in 2011), whilst the author spread his wings with a swathe of other features such as Wondertown (art by Benoit Feroumont) and the hugely popular children’s thriller Seuls (with artist Bruno Gazzotti and translated after far too long as the Alone series) before undertaking a high-profile stint on veteran all-ages adventure strip Spirou and Fantasio.

Vehlmann has continued to craft enticing and engaging tales for kids (Samedi et Dimanche) but is equally adept on more mature fare like IAN and Sept psychopaths (with Sean Phillips). He even briefly drew his own strip Bob le Cowboy…

His partner in crime on Green Manor was Denis Bodart, who studied at the Saint Luc academy in Brussels before taking up teaching. He soon resorted to a life in comics, debuting in 1985 with Saint-Germaine des Morts (scripted by Streng) for publishing house Dupuis.

Three years later he co-created – with writer Yann (Yannick Le Pennetier) – Célestin Speculoos for Circus and Nicotine Goudron for l’Écho des Savanes, whilst acting as a jobbing freelance comics artist with work regularly appearing in Le Journal de Spirou and elsewhere.

Following his highly acclaimed turn here (beginning with Assassins et gentleman), he moved on to succeed Jean-Maire Beuriot as artist of Casterman’s prestigious Amours Fragiles.

The premise of the mystery story is both deliciously simple and wickedly palatable. As this book opens in the infamous Bethlehem Psychiatric Hospital in 1899, eminent Dr. Thorne is attempting to interview the inmate known as Thomas Below.

A domestic in a Gentleman’s Club for his entire life, the poor unfortunate became violently delusional mere days before retirement. Now as Thorne questions the madman deep in the bowels of “Bedlam”, the savant realises the sorry soul before him believes he is Green Manor incarnate. He has certainly been privy to all that strange place’s secrets, surprises and hushed-up scandals. Hesitantly at first, Below begins telling tales of rich, powerful and ostensibly honourable men at their most excessive and unbearable,,,

What follows is a macabre menu of short tales linked by proximity and tone, beginning with ‘Delicious Shivers’, wherein a roomful of The Great and the Good gathered around aged patriarch Dr. Byron on an October night in 1879. The respected physician posed an intriguing challenge to the assemblage: can there be a murder without a victim or a murderer?

Most of the men present had dark hearts and cunning minds and Sir Foswell rose to the challenge with his story of a noted aristocrat who erased an unwise early marriage and “disappeared” his unwanted bride by dint of bloodshed, money and influence.

Inspector Darcroft then related a case whereby there was no discernible murderer although the victim was most certainly gunned down at close range…

As the heated banter built, events took a very dark turn once Byron informed them that he had personally caused such an impossible crime to be committed. To the shocked silence of the throng he described how the administration of an extremely slow-acting poison in the drinks of some, many or all of those gathered might or might not kill an unspecified number of them at some unguessable time in the future…

Of course he might just have been jesting to win a point, but nobody went home complacently that night…

‘Post-Scriptum’ described the lethal intellectual duel between dashing young Detective Johnson and aged Sir Alfred Montgomery in August 1882, after the latter defied the policeman to stop him killing a young woman. The rules of the competition are quite strict and the noble believes he has succeeded in committing a perfect crime, but although the noble correctly considers himself a cunning planner his character judgement leaves much to be desired…

Weary and frustrated police Inspector Gray‘s decades-long hunt for a serial killer ended in shock and castigation when he arrived at an astounding conclusion one gloomy night at the Club in September 1882. That worthy’s too-late grasp of an impossible ‘Modus Operandi’ subsequently led to glorious triumph, but also a most surprising outcome and response from a fellow clubman and confidante…

The most baroque and arcane yarn involves another intellectual game and imaginative wager placed in March 1893, when two connoisseurs of crime determined to commit the most artful murder of all time. Their target would be none other than author and criminologist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and to make things interesting the offending weapon could only be ’21 Halberds’…

In April 1872 Lord Denton invited young artist Eric Kaye into the Green Manor Club to repair a damaged painting by the great lost genius Jason Sutter. However, the dazzled dauber became obsessed with the story behind the austere family portrait – especially a tragic, beautiful daughter who suddenly vanished from history – depicted in ‘Sutter 1801’, and his fervent enquiries led to the resolution of a decades-old mystery, murder most foul and eventual banishment as his only reward.

Proud and undaunted, Kaye patiently devised a most exquisite vengeance…

The catalogue of upper class skulduggery concludes with ‘The Ballad of Dr. Thompson’ and a most arcane and uncanny murder mystery which begins in 1878, as great friends Professor Ballard and Thompson bid each other a drunken goodnight on the club steps. Only one of them makes it home safely…

When the other’s corpse is found stuffed into a grandfather clock police investigations soon lead to the most insane of conclusions…

Wry, witty, wickedly funny and sublimely entertaining, Assassins and Gentlemen offers a superbly rewarding peek at High Society and low morals as seen from across the Channel and over eventful decades, which will delight and astound lovers of clever crime fiction and classy comics confabulations – and there’s even better to follow…

 

Sequel release The Inconvenience of Being Dead is a double-length compact Cinebook edition, and like its predecessor is sadly unavailable in English digital formats. However, it does deliver the final pair of original volumes – De l’inconvenient d’Atre mort and Fantaisies meurtriares – which saw Green Manor’s continual catalogue of High Society crime, calumny, depravity and outrage lead to an inevitable sorry conclusion…

The premise is deliciously simple and wickedly palatable. As seen in the first collection, prominent alienist Dr. Thorne has become obsessed with Thomas Below, currently incarcerated in the infamous Bethlehem Psychiatric Hospital.

Thorne resumes the unconventional interviews in 1899 as the savant is dragged from his bed to attend Below once again. This time the need is most urgent. The old retainer has escaped, broken into a house and taken a family hostage. Hesitantly the healer makes his approach and engages the affable maniac in conversation. All too readily Below begins telling more tales of rich, powerful and ostensibly honourable men at their most excessive and unbearable…

The macabre menu of skits and sketches opens with ‘Child’s Play’ from March 1871 wherein cruel Lord Virgil observed and was incensed by a passive, gentle servant with the patience of Job. The noble’s instantly resolved instinct was to turn the saint into a murdering thing of evil.

Admitting to possession of a foolproof, infallible and much-proved method of killing-by-proxy to a roomful of The Great and the Good gathered around, Virgil determined to drive good-natured George into eternally debasing and damning himself by using the system to save himself from torment. Sadly, one man’s torment is another man’s test of faith, and good old George is far from the predictable peasant he appears…

In 1885, dilettante supernaturalist Joseph Sharp returned from Prague following a fruitless shopping trip for magical spells and objects, only to find his best friend Mark Abbott languishing under the force of a family curse. However, detailed investigation of ‘The Mark of the Beast’ and a ghastly family secret in a crypt only proved once again that the unknown has very little force or impact when measured against a mother’s hate, the infinite patience of the tormented and a victim’s fevered imagination…

One night in 1876, Lord Justice Sherman realised he had condemned an innocent man to death, even though not a single shred of evidence existed to confirm his opinion. With one night remaining to save his man, the elderly jurist took to the streets of London to find the true culprit and succeeded, utterly unaware that the malefactor involved had already taken vengeance for the judge’s noble act in advance of its completion and Sherman’s ‘Last Wishes’…

In 1897 bombastic, belligerent General Miller gloated at the Club. He had at last come into possession of the fabled Spear of Longinus. The military martinet had no fear of the legends and many deaths laid upon the artefact or ‘The Centurion’s Shadow’, but was beguiled by its repute as a tool to make great men all-conquering.

Nevertheless, he was soon one more corpse attributed to the talisman – and not the last – until a pair of the Club’s armchair investigators applied learning and logic: exposing a deadly trap constructed by one of history’s greatest thinkers… albeit, just a little too late…

With the hostage crisis coming to end, Below shares his most shocking epigram as ‘Voodoo Night’ finds the gathered gentlemen – over cigars and brandy – casually dissecting a juicy murder one evening in December 1870. With irreconcilable facts and impossible assumptions heatedly flying about, soon only absurdity or the supernatural are left as answers to the mystery of the slaying of boorish lout Lord Killian. However, in another room, the genteel conversation of the closeted Ladies married to the assemblage of tobacco-smoking idiots soon reveals a so-simple truth…

The last legends of the Club were gathered up in appendix Murderous Fancies, with the increasingly obsessed Thorne receiving word that Below has passed away. Briefly thinking himself free at last, it is with mixed feeling that the doctor takes custody of the illegible scrawls of the troubled retainer and wearily, warily dares to decipher them…

‘Endgame’ relates an incident from June 1871 when the Club was driven to distraction by the will of recently paralysed Lord Wyatt. It was in the form of a nonsense riddle, and the first to solve it would win all Wyatt’s prodigious wealth…

At the same time, the executor secretly consulted with pioneering dementia expert Dr. Sheffer over the mental state of his master. The aristocrat claimed his parlous condition was the result of a murder attempt, and this riddle might well be a trap to catch the assailant. Sheffer knew better but soon had every reason to regret his rather rash conclusions…

‘A Small Crime Serenade’ found an aged, innocuous gentleman in garrulous mood one night in 1867, sharing with a dutiful Club servant his great gift and passion: a life-long ability to get away with murder. Sadly, his boast of capping his career with one final killing was derailed by a most unanticipated event.

In 1827, talk at Green Manor was of only one matter: the recent demise of a radical libertarian poet. Especially fervent was young devotee Dr. Daniel Ballantyne who promptly fell for a cruel prank when the Club grandees purportedly offered him a chance to autopsy the body and look ‘In the Head of William Blake’. They had arranged that what he saw would be like nothing he had ever experienced…

Ballantyne disappeared that night, and in the cold light of day an inexorable campaign of terror began as the japesters were slowly driven mad by notes threatening vengeance from the “Tygers of Wrath”…

In lighter vein, ‘Fight to the Finish’ related how a brace of bored big game hunters invented an imaginative game in May 1859. Their aim was to determine who exactly was the absolute best. The prey was to be each other but – although the rules of the competition were strict and fair – as the days progressed it seemed that neither Lord Bennett nor Lord Turner were as able or as gentlemanly as they claimed…

The dead man’s tales ended with a chilling homily from 1872 wherein the cream of Society discussed the strange case of Lord Sanders who had blighted his own financial empire and destroyed his greedy heirs by cruelly and carefully tying the purse-strings of their inheritances.

The dominating oligarch had left a vast list of tasks for his four children to fulfil in ‘The Testament’: far too many for any person or persons to complete before getting their undeserving hands on his ill-gotten gains. Of course, even he could not predict how and where greed and frustration could take a desperate man…

And with that final story shared, Below no longer plagued the good doctor’s days, but his influence remained long after he was gone…

Mordant, imaginative, darkly wry and cruelly rewarding, The Inconvenience of Being Dead confirms our most heartfelt suspicions about the pointlessly privileged and inexplicably esteemed, damning them all as useless, venal and worse: A class apart that we could all do without, but a perfect target for all the disdain we can wring from them with rich black comedy and classy comics confabulations like these.
Original editions © Dupuis 2005 by Vehlmann & Bodart. All rights reserved. English translations 2008 by Cinebook Ltd.

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Lucky Luke volume 20: The Oklahoma Land Rush


By Morris & Goscinny, translated by Luke Spear (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-008-5 (PB Album/Digital edition)

Doughty, dashing and dependable cowboy champion Lucky Luke is a rangy, implacably even-tempered do-gooder able to “draw faster than his own shadow”. He amiably ambles across the fabulously mythic Old West, enjoying light-hearted adventures on his rather sarcastic wonder-horse Jolly Jumper. The taciturn trailblazer regularly interacts with a host of historical and legendary figures as well as even odder folk in tales drawn from key themes of classic cowboy films – as well as some uniquely European notions, and interpretations…

Over 8 decades, his exploits have made him one of the top-ranking comic characters in the world, generating upwards of 85 individual albums with sales totalling in excess of 300 million in 30 languages thus far. That renown has led to a mountain of spin-off albums, plus toys, computer games, animated cartoons, a plethora of TV shows and live-action movies and even commemorative exhibitions. No theme park yet, but you never know…  when…?

The brainchild of Belgian animator, illustrator and cartoonist Maurice de Bévère (“Morris”) and first officially seen in Le Journal de Spirou‘s seasonal Annual L’Almanach Spirou 1947, Luke sprang to laconic life in 1946, before inevitably ambling into his first weekly adventure ‘Arizona 1880’ on December 7th 1946.

Working solo until 1955, Morris produced nine albums of affectionate sagebrush spoofery before teaming with old pal and fellow trans-American tourist Rene Goscinny. When Rene became his regular wordsmith, Luke attained dizzying, legendary, heights starting with Des rails sur la Prairie (Rails on the Prairie) which began serialisation on August 25th 1955. In 1967, the six-gun straight-shooter switched sides, joining Goscinny’s own magazine Pilote for La Diligence (The Stagecoach).

Goscinny co-created 45 albums with Morris before his untimely death, whence Morris soldiered on both singly and with other collaborators. The artist died in 2001, having drawn fully 70 adventures, plus numerous sidebar sagebrush sagas crafted with Achdé, Laurent Gerra, Benacquista & Pennac, Xavier Fauche, Jean Léturgie, Jacques Pessis and others, all taking their own shot at the venerable vigilante…

Lucky Luke has history in Britain too, having first pseudonymously amused and enthralled young readers during the late 1950s, syndicated to weekly anthology Film Fun. He later rode back into comics-town in 1967 for comedy paper Giggle, using nom de plume Buck Bingo.

Ruée sur l’Oklahoma was Morris & Goscinny’s 5th collaboration, originally serialised in 1960 before becoming the 14th album release: a wryly satirical romp based on the actual property reallocation event of 1889, and is delivered with only the slightest application of a little extra whimsical imagination to the actual brutal skulduggery and chicanery of history…

In the real world, President Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation on March 23rd 1889 opening the “Unassigned Lands” of Oklahoma to non-Indian settlers. Citing the 1862 Homestead Act, it promised any white who could stay on and improve a parcel of land for five years would own it free, clear and without cost. It led to a free-for-all scramble on April 22nd year with an estimated 50,000 people looking for a prime location to put down roots…

The comic version begins on the inhospitable plains of the Oklahoma territory where a representative of the American government trades a pile of trinkets and baubles to the resident Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole tribes who were originally dumped there against their collective will by white soldiers.

They are more than happy to leave those dry, dusty, dull, decidedly depressing regions…

In Washington DC, Senators are gloating over opening the region to colonisation, but troubled that all the settlers eager to own their own land and property might one day be accusing them of negligence or worse unless the allocation process is scrupulously fair. Agreeing on a strictly-monitored race as the most transparent method, the statesmen then need to ensure it’s an honest one, and call in American legend Lucky Luke to oversee the process and adjudicate disputes.

Heading westward on Jolly Jumper, the lone rider’s first task is removing the white folk already occupying their own parcels of land before the official start date. Some are there innocently and others have decided to get a head start and secure prime locations, but eventually all are moved back (some into makeshift jails) beyond the notional starting line of the great Oklahoma rush for land…

Backed up by the cavalry and a horde of lawyers Lucky leaves the “Promised Land” clean and clear for the big day, but is kept busy stopping cheating “sooners” from sneaking in early and staking claims illegally: wicked men and enterprising criminals like Beastly Blubber or Coyote Will and his simple stooge Dopey. Their escapades grow increasingly wild as the start day approaches, but Lucky can handle them. What’s more troubling is the ordinary everyday one-upmanship scurrilously employed by the “honest” citizen-contestants: sabotaging each other’s transport, doping their draft animals and worse.

Eventually, the moment comes, cannons boom and the race for space begins…

Humans being what they are, however, every competitor heads for the same few miles of the two million acres (8100 square kilometres) and overnight the mangy metropolis of Boomville springs up. Despite being held until the race was well underway Beastly Blubber, Coyote Will and Dopey are quick to capitalise on the progress and jealous hostility of the settlers, forcing Lucky to step in repeatedly and – ultimately – ban booze and all guns in the city…

Gradually civilisation blossoms and Luke thinks his job is done when the citizens call an election for Mayor. He couldn’t be more wrong, but the plebiscite does signal the end in another painfully ironic and tragically foreboding way…

Employing classic set-piece slapstick and crafty cinematic caricature but layering on an unusually jaundiced – but frighteningly accurate – view of politicians, government and human nature, The Oklahoma Land Rush deftly weaponizes history (Indian displacement, the future Dust Bowl and the billions of barrels of unexploited oil beneath that unhappy soil) to deliver a funny story with plenty of sharp edges and ends, and a sharp twist to keep readers smugly satisfied. Here is another wildly entertaining all-ages confection by unparalleled comics masters, affording an enticing glimpse into a unique genre for today’s readers who might well have missed the romantic allure of an all-pervasive Wild West that never was…
© Dargaud Editeur Paris 1971 by Goscinny & Morris. © Lucky Comics. English translation © 2009 Cinebook Ltd.

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Hitchcock: Master of Suspense


By Noël Simsolo & Dominique Hé, translated by Matt Maden (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-296-0 (HB) eISBN: 978-168112-289-2

Graphic biography is now a mainstay of graphic novel publishing: so much so that distinct styles and approaches have evolved, ranging from primarily factual reiterations to predominantly fictionalised accounts, with events and actions extrapolated and dramatized in search of some higher truth.

In this superbly gripping exploration of filmmaker and self-created celebrity Alfred Hitchcock, authors Noël Simsolo & Dominique Hé have chosen – most fittingly – to stage manage facts, achievements and accomplishments to craft a beguiling mystery.

In addition to scripting comics series such as Saladin, Napoleon and Lodewijk de Heilige, French writer Simsolo is a film director, novelist, comedian and cinema historian who wrote a biography of Sergio Leone.

Dominique Hé is an illustrator and comics veteran who got his start in 1973 after chucking his intended career as an astronomer. Apprenticing by limning Jean Giraud stories for Pilote, he moved on to Metal Hurlant, compiling material for two albums of short tales dubbed Voyages, before creating ghost-busting, weird science specialist Marc Mathieu. In 1988 he drew Alex Lechat for Le Journal de Mickey and went on to craft many more adventure serials like Tanatha, Moonfleet, Sophaletta and Sécretes Bancaires. Here his delightfully moody gifts stage a spooky, foggy monochrome greytone movie experience as we follow the life and career of a master not just of suspense but also personal brand management…

The epic unfolds through intercut flashbacks, focusing simultaneously on different time periods, pinpointed and highlighted via his 55 official film releases and other works. Throughout, “Hitch” is used as his own narrator, in frighteningly candid and revelatory conversations with glittering associates (because you will come away realising that – other than his wife Alma and mother Emma – he had no close friends) and such actors as he could bear to talk to, such as Grace Kelly, Carole Lombard and Cary Grant.

We open in 1960. Paris in November is rapt with the debut of Psycho – just like every other city on Earth. As Hitch and Alma continue their prickly but utterly honest and committed life of success, thoughts wing back to Cannes in 1964 as ‘Honni soit Qui Mal Y Pense’ finds the director regaling Grant and Kelly with tales of a unique childhood…

That’s pretty much all you’re getting here. This is too good a book and too well constructed to give away anything. However, in keeping with the Master’s whimsical humour and the assurance of a superbly entertaining time, here’s a tantalising list of chapter titles to spark your imagination. The eventual delivery will not disappoint you…

His ‘Apprenticeship’ is pretty self-explanatory, but progress is not assured in ‘The Young Man With the Mind of a Master’. ‘Silence and Cries’ lead to ‘Highs and Lows’ before attaining the ‘Summit’, whereafter ‘The Temptation of Departure’ heralds ‘The French Connection’ and ‘A New World’.

The success and security of later life afforded little protection from Hitch’s driving hunger for validation. He spent much of his life failing to make the one film he always wanted to, always distracted by the immediate and instead just making better and better movies. He did find time to conquer the new medium of television though. ‘The Killers Are Among Us’ sparked ‘Descent into Hell’, but always he pursued ‘Experimentation’; never finding his ‘State of Grace’. Settling in the USA, ‘Citizen Hitchcock’ found ‘Apotheosis’, and encountered further ‘Turbulence’ as advancing age signalled one ‘Final Role’…

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE was a brilliant creator who changed the way cinema worked and how tales are told. A tireless traveller and resident of many nations, he was a manic homebody with a vast appetite for domestic comfort. He was a devout catholic trapped by his upbringing, guilty and anxious his entire life. Simultaneously sexually obsessed and painfully chaste, he was a voyeur who utilised his peccadillo to build a new means of seeing and telling stories, adroitly using his methodical planning skills and graphic design talents to storyboard films – and manipulate people in the exact same manner. Like the creators of this book, he knew how to nest stories within stories and how to satisfy an audience whilst leaving them hungry for more.

This wonderful tome includes scholarly appendices too: an ‘Alfred Hitchcock Filmography’ spanning 1922-1976, detailing his entire oeuvre broken down into Director, Assistant Director and Screenwriter, a Select List of abandoned film projects and his signature Cameos. There’s also an extensive Bibliography of books about the man, his works and his legacy.

Sublimely layering fact, mythology and critical appraisal, Hitchcock: Master of Suspense offers a fulsome exploration of an iconic legend who made his own life as much an artwork as any of his films. Furthermore, it does so in a manner supremely befitting the attributes and inclinations of the man for whom storytelling was a way of life, fear was food and drink, and mystery a blessing.

© 2018 Dargaud-Benelux. © 2020 NBM for the English Translation. All rights reserved.
© DUPUIS 2020 by Rubio, Efa. All rights reserved.

Hitchcock: Master of Suspense is scheduled for UK release June 2nd 2022 and is available for pre-order. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats.

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Georgia O’Keeffe


By María Herreros; translated by Lawrence Schimel (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-05-8 (TPB/Digital edition)

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe entered the world in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on November 15th 1887, second of seven children born to a dairy farmer turned (failed) construction entrepreneur. Seized and overwhelmed by the artistic impulse before the age of ten, she overcame financial hardship to secure an impressive traditional artistic education which she promptly rejected in favour of finding her own path.

From 1917 and her first exhibition, to her death in 1986, she made art her way, most famously with series of paintings of flowers, buildings and ultimately desert scenes which became a catalyst of taste and part of global artistic culture. She is regarded as America’s first abstract artist and has been called The Mother of American Modernism.

Innocently controversial from the start, O’Keeffe increasingly sought to understand colour and shape via stark cityscapes and florid blossoms but had to endure censure and gossip over nude photos exhibited by her patron Alfred Stieglitz, and the indignity of having her flower paintings mansplained by critics – even female ones – who continuously likened them to female sexual organs.

Bored with saying ‘They’re just flowers’ and self-important fools, she began a gradual, years-long process of quitting metropolitan civilisation for peace, contentment and endless inspiration under the big skies and vivid deserts of New Mexico.

Over a decades-long career. O’Keefe garnered international acclaim and many awards. These included an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the College of William and Mary (1938); election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences(1966); receiving the M. Carey Thomas Award from Bryn Mawr College (1971) and another honorary degree (from Harvard in 1973) as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), The National Medal of Arts (1985) and – in 1993 – posthumous induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

As you’d expect of a determined, driven professional woman of that period in that country, making extremely successful headway in a predominantly male preserve, her personal life was something of a trainwreck, but this compelling examination chooses to downplay those aspects.

Sensibly side-lining the more sensationalised moments of O’Keefe’s past in favour of tracing her accomplishments and victories, graphic biographer Mar­a Herreros has employed her painterly, primitivistic narrative style which liberally samples O’Keeffe’s copious canon of letters and idiosyncratic writings to bring us inside the head of a profoundly visual and arguably obsessive being.

Based in Madrid, but born in Valencia in 1983, Herreros is a modern multidisciplinary artist. She studied at the University of Fine Arts, San Carlos and since 2011 has combined high level commercial commissions with gallery shows, book collaborations and comics such as Viva la Dolce Vita, Marilyn tena once dedos en los pies, and Paris sera toujours Paris. Her personal works explore human emotion, societal evolution and the concepts of beauty and normative states.

Although remaining primarily positive and inquisitive here, Herreros touches on O’Keeffe’s mental ill health issues, her Svengali-like attachment (later marriage) to older, already-married Fine Art photographer/gallery owner Stieglitz and her end-of-life companion John Bruce “Juan” Hamilton – both notorious age-inappropriate public scandals that Georgia casually, magnificently, ignored.

Via communications with Georgia’s close female friends and Stieglitz, Herreros takes us inside the painter’s mind, revealing the creative process and progress in navigating society, the public and the poison chalice of simply having to exhibit art to survive, while emphasising making the images she wanted to in places she truly loved which became her greatest joy and solitary citadels.

Less a biography than a carefully crafted appreciation and appraisal of a career and legacy by a fellow fully emancipated, self-determining female creator, Georgia O’Keeffe is a compelling and beguiling glimpse into the forces that shape art and artists.
Text and illustrations © 2021 by Mar­a Herreros. All rights reserved. Published by agreement with Astiberri Ediciones and Fundacian Coleccian Thyssen-Bornemisza English translation © 2021 SelfMadeHero.

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The Boxer – the True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft


By Reinhardt Kleist; translated by Michael Waaler (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-906838-77-5 (TPB/Digital edition)

Multi-award-winning German illustrator, designer, author, cartoonist and comics maker Reinhard Kleist (Berlinoir; Steeplechase; Das Grauen im Gemäuer) has been working in the industry since 1994: setting up a cooperative studio/atelier and beginning his professional career with graphic biography Lovecraft, and supernal dramas Minna, Das Festmahl, and Abenteuer eines Weichenstellers while still a student in Münster.

He has constantly explored and gratified his fascination with notable individuals who have overcome stacked odds and inner darkness in stellar works such as Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness; Elvis – An Illustrated Biography; Castro; An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusaf Omar and Nick Cave: Mercy on Me.

In 2011 he again turned to boxing for inspiration, adapting a Holocaust biography written by the son of a survivor of the death camps. Hertzko/Herschel “Harry” Haft might be regarded amongst the more noteworthy of those benighted souls: a ruthlessly determined individual who overcame every iteration of horror and privation, using his fists and low cunning.

His life was first recounted in 2006 by his son Alan Scott Haft in prose biography Harry Haft: Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano, and as well as the graphic novel under review here, you can absorb the tale in filmic form in Barry Levinson’s movie adaptation The Survivor.

Delivered in stark monochrome, Kleist’s compelling and uncompromising interpretation opens with the protagonist a humble grocer in America, trying to relate to his young son. Harry is a hard man to relate to, but in a moment of contrition he promises to one day share with his boy what made him that way.

Alan waited another forty years to hear the truth and turned it into a narrative for everyone…

The story proper opens in 1939, in the Polish town of Belchatow. Since the Germans came, the Jewish Haft family have become smugglers, and 14-year old Hertzko thinks himself invincible.

His father had sold fruit and veg but found it increasingly difficult to support a wife and eight children. When he died, the family splintered and only Hertzko and brothers Aria and Peretz stayed with their mother. When the invasion took hold, their illicit activities made them all targets, but amidst daily outrages, he found opportunity for love and was betrothed to Leah Pablanski, daughter of the receiver of all the contraband he shifted across the Nazis’ new borders…

When Hertzko was transported to his first labour camp, seeing Leah again one day was the dream that kept him going. Barely literate but strong and determined he had a gift for being useful and, despite toiling in the most horrific circumstances and being present for every atrocity of the regime, he endured – especially after his smuggling experience made him an essential tool of one particular guard officer who was methodically enriching himself at the prisoners’ expense…

Moved from camp to camp as a slave labourer, Hertzko eventually arrived in Jaworzno camp and was reunited with his brother Peretz. Here his sponsor found him less egregious duties. All he had to do was fight other prisoners in Sunday exhibition matches for the officers. Haft had never boxed before, but would do anything for better conditions and what passed for “guaranteed” survival. What he did there remained with him for the rest of his life…

Despite his resilience and adaptability, Haft always found himself at the mercy of superior and more ruthless forces. As the Allies slowly pushed the Nazis back on all fronts, he was left to the “death marches” the SS instigated to empty the camps and hide evidence of their industrialised slaughter factories. Over and again, Haft dodged certain death and committed more sins until finally captured by American troops. Soon his underworld experience was being exploited by the GIs as Hertzko ran a bordello for the soldiers. When Peretz resurfaced, Haft finally had time and enough money to go looking for Leah. That trail led ultimately to America.

While in US-occupied Straubing, Haft had won a boxing competition organised by the Army, and was – after further machinations – allowed to emigrate in 1946. He was 23 years old…

The second half of Haft’s life began in the New World. He still wanted Leah and decided fame would be the key. The fight game in America was popular but increasingly under the control of organized crime. Nevertheless, Haft – now calling himself “Hershel” and “Harry” – pursued his chosen path with relentless zeal.

Overcoming every administrative obstacle, he found a manager, learned how to actually box rather than fight and kept on winning.

The equation was simple. Leah was here somewhere. If he could get his picture in the papers or newsreels or even on this new television thing, she would see him and get in touch. Sadly, it only brought him to the attention of mobsters. After his moment of glory fighting Rocky Marciano in 1949, Haft learned how his chosen world really worked…

Walking away, he married a neighbour’s daughter in November and opened a grocery store in Brooklyn. In 1963 the family took a trip to Florida and young son Alan helped locate a woman named Leah Lieberman…

Please be warned: The Boxer is not just a testament of atrocity or celebration of the human spirit under the most appalling conditions. It’s also a real world love story where the always-inevitable ultimate reunion does not follow the rules of romantic fiction or bring about a happy ending.

Kleist’s graphic tour de force is supplemented by a stunning gallery of sketches and working drawings, and backed up with a picture-packed essay from sports journalist Martin Krauss.

‘Boxing in concentration camps – a report’ details the long-neglected topic of Nazi sports exhibitions in work and death camps and relates it to Haft’s later professional career in America, including a chilling sidebar on ‘US boxing and the Mafia’. Also on the bill are biographies of other ‘Forgotten champions’ of the camps: Victor “Young” Perez; Noach Klieger; Leendert “Leen” Josua Sanders; Leone “Lelletto” Efrati; Salamo Arouch; Jacko Razon; Johann “Rukelie” Trollman; Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski and Francesco “Kid Francis” Buonagurio.

Potent, powerful, moving and memorable, this is a quest tale well told and one not easily forgotten.
© Text and illustrations 2012 CARLSEN Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, Germany. © Appendix 2012 Martin Krauß and CARLSEN Verlag. English translation © 2021 SelfMadeHero. All rights reserved.

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Bootblack


By Mikael, translated by Matt Maden (NBM) 
ISBN: 978-1-68112-296-0 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-297-7 

Certain eras and locales perennially resonate with both entertainment consumers and story creators. The Wild West, Victorian London, the trenches of the Somme, and so many more quasi-mythological locales instantly evoke images of drama, tension and tales begging to be told. In these modern times of doom and privation, one of the most evocative is Depression-era America; specifically the Big City. 

Perhaps because it feels so tantalizingly within reach of living memory, or thanks to its cachet as the purported land of promises and untapped opportunity, America has always fascinated storytellers – especially comics-creators – from the “Old World” of Europe. This inclination has delivered many potent and rewarding stories, none more so than this continentally-published yarn by multi-disciplinary, multi award-winning French-born, Quebecois auteur and autodidact Mikael (Giant; Junior l’Aventurier; Rapa Nui, Promise).

Published in Europe by Dargaud in 2018, Bootblack originated as twin albums before being released as a brace of English-language digital tomes courtesy of Europe Comics. It now manifests as an oversized (229 x 305mm), resoundingly resilient hardback edition that gets the entire story done-in-one.

We open in Germany in 1945 where a weary G.I. pauses on a corpse-covered, crow-ridden battlefield to reflect on how he got there. Once upon a time, his given name was Alternberg: after the German village his family fled to America from. One day in 1929 – even before his tenth birthday – the boy rejected that name and his family; running away from his New York City ghetto hours before tragedy erased it, making him forever an orphan of the streets. 

As “Al”, he grifted and grafted with other homeless kids, mostly making money by shining shoes. His best pal was James “Shiny” Rasmussen and he adored from afar shopkeeper’s daughter Maggie. That ambitious, self-educated go-getter had no time for him, but her mute little brother William – whom everyone else called Buster – was readily accepted by the street kids who eked out a precarious living. 

Their scavenging for every cent was punctuated by clashes with rival kid gangs whose members had grown up as peewee versions of their nostalgically nationalistic, backward-looking elders. Al’s guys considered themselves True Americans, with no ties to some former “old country” that had no time or place for them… 

Al’s life changed again in 1935 when charismatic boy-pickpocket Joseph “Finger Joe” Bazilsky moved into the district. Soon after, Al became Al Chrysler and shoeshine shenanigans grew into errands – and worse – for local hood/entrepreneur Frankie… 

Throughout those years, Al pursued Maggie, gradually wearing her down and building a rapport with his constant promises of a dream trip to Coney Island. However, just when he got close enough to learn what made her tick, another clash with the “German” bootblack kids caused the death of someone they all loved… 

Al and Maggie never really had a chance, not with her home life and Joe always somehow in the way at the most inopportune moments… 

Ultimately, the increasingly hostile situation escalated into crisis, inevitably drawing every player into a tragic confrontation prompting more bad decisions and wrong choices, leading to betrayal and a destiny-drenched denouement in a field that could never have been Al’s homeland… 

Told in a clever sequence of overlapping flashbacks – like Christopher Nolan’s Memento – everything about this stylish Depression-era drama is big, powerfully mythic and tragically foredoomed in a truly Shakespearean manner. Packed with period detail and skilfully tapping into the abundance of powerful, socially-aware novels, plays and movies which immortalised pre-WWII America, this collection also includes a gallery of stunning art tableaus at the back of the book… 

Bootblack is moving, memorable and momentous, another triumph of graphic narrative you must not miss. 
© 2019, 2020 Dargaud-Benelux (Dargaud-Lombard s.a.) – Mikael. 

Bootblack is scheduled for UK release May 19th 2022 and is available for pre-order now.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads go to NBM Publishing at nbmpub.com.

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Days of Sand


By Aimée De Jongh, translated by Christopher Bradley (SelfMadeHero) 
ISBN: 978-1-914224-04-1 (HB)  

Certain eras and locales constantly resonate with both narrative consumers and creators. The mythical Wild West, the trenches of the Somme, Ancient Rome, 1940s Hollywood and so many more emotionally evocative enclaves of mythologised moments spark responses of drama, tension and tales crying out to be told.  

One of the most evocative derives from Depression-era America, but rather than a noir-drenched misty Big City, Aimée De Jongh drew her inspiration from a scrupulously documented decade long human catastrophe that inescapably presages ecological collapse in our imminent future. 

The Netherlands-born comics creator, story-boarder, Director and animator studied at Rotterdam, Ghent and Paris before beginning her career as a newspaper cartoonist. While releasing graphic novels The Return of the Honey Buzzard, Blossoms in Autumn and Taxi!, the multi-disciplined, multi award-winning artist worked in television, on music videos and animated movies (Aurora), for gallery shows (Janus), and latterly turned to graphic journalism, detailing refugee life in Greece’s migrant camps. 

Combining overlapping interests in travel, documentary and ecology, her latest opus tells a carefully curated and fictionalized account of one young man’s reaction to the 1930’s Dust Bowl disaster and the resultant diaspora it triggered over ten years of drought.  

To research the tale – released in Europe in 2021 as two-volume Jours de sable – De Jongh travelled extensively through the region (Oklahoma to California), visiting remaining historical sites and museums while accessing the precious wealth of photographic material sponsored by the contemporary Farm Security Administration. This federal entity recorded the tragedy which forms the narrative spine of this story.  

De Jongh’s blog offers interested readers further insights and this book includes commentary and many of the original photographs that ultimately moved the event from environmental aberration to cultural myth and human tragedy. 

This is not a tale about plot and action but premise and reaction. Captivatingly rendered with colour acting as a special effects suite and utilizing original 1930s photographs throughout, it sees unemployed photographer John Clark take a job in 1937: hired like many others to document the human and economic effects of a decade-long drought and bad farming practises on the people of Oklahoma. Trapped at the heart of an un-Natural Disaster, they daily endure the frightening and no-longer gradual transition of their once lush lands of milk and honey and grass and fruitfulness into a new Sahara desert… 

Unfortunately, Clark has more baggage than just a shooting script and camera cases, and as he carries out his task, he slowly loses perspective and secure distance in the face of awestriking nature and humanity in its rawest, most reduced state. How can his camera intrude and explore when he’s as much lost and unbalanced as any of his subjects? 

It’s easy to read in subtextual messages and apply modern tropes and memes ranging from the movie Dune to the current global migrant crisis or each and every western government’s insipid pettifogging disinclination to take charge or an iota of responsibility. The world has never been in a worse state and if this book motivates anyone to make a change – however small – that’s a big win. However, it’s not the point.  

Terror, loss, hopeless misery and hunger for a better life have always been with us. The fact that our imminent doom is self-inflicted is irrelevant. The fact that everyone is/will be affected is a non sequitur. What’s germane is that when Kent or Hampshire are dust bowls and all Pacific islands are underwater, it’s still going to come down at some point to every one of us making a decision…  

An international hit garnering many honours and accolades, Days of Sand is staggering beautiful, distressingly unforgettable and never more timely, but please don’t dismiss it as a trendy and pretty polemic. This is a timeless examination of individual human choice in reaction to overwhelming, immeasurable forces and how individuals may respond. What’s presented here is one concerned artist’s narrative riposte. What’s yours? 

Jours de sable © DARGAUD-BENELUX (DARGAUD-LOMBARD S.A.) 2021, by Aimée De Jongh. All rights reserved  

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Jonah Hex volume 3: Origins


By Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Jordi Bernet, and others (DC Comics) 

ISBN: 978-1-84576-629-0 (TPB/Digital edition) 

The Western is an odd genre that can be sub-divided into two discrete halves: the sparkly, shiny version that dominated kids’ books, comics and television for decades, exemplified by Zane Grey stories and heroes like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Then there’s the other half… 

That kind of cowboy – grimy, gritty, excessively dark and nihilistic –was done best for decades by Europeans in such strips as Jean-Michel Charlier’s Lieutenant Blueberry or Bonelli & Galleppini’s Tex Willer and made their way into US culture through the films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.  

Jonah Hex is very best of this latter sort. 

DC opened a stable of clean-cut gun-slingers as the super-hero genre imploded in 1949, with dashing and highly readable luminaries like Johnny Thunder, Nighthawk, The Trigger Twins, Matt Savage and dozens of others in a marketplace that seemed limitless in its voracious hunger for chaps in chaps.  

However, all things end and by the early sixties the sagebrush brigade had dwindled to a few venerable properties. A flurry of superheroes hogged the newsstands during the Silver Age from 1956, but as the 1960s closed, they were waning again and thematic changes in the cinematic Cowboy filtered through to a comics industry suffering its second super-hero retreat in twenty years.  

All-Star Western #1 was released with an August/September 1970 cover date, filled with Pow-Wow Smith reprints, and became an all-new anthology with its second issue. It featured numerous creative all-stars, including Robert Kanigher, Neal Adams, Gray Morrow, Al Williamson, Gil Kane, Angelo Torres, & Dick Giordano, working on Outlaw!, Billy the Kid and cult sleeper-hit El Diablo: combining shoot-em-up shenanigans with supernatural chills, in deference to the real hit genre-type that saved comics in those dark days – horror stories. 

Issue #10 introduced a disfigured, irascible, shockingly lethal bounty hunter created by writer John Albano & Tony DeZuñiga and DC finally found its greatest and most enduring Western Warrior…  

Hex is the very model of a modern anti-hero. Coarse, callous, proudly uneducated, the relentless manhunter is clad in battered Confederate Grey, half his face lost to a hideous past injury. He offers the aspect of a brutal thug little better than the scum he hunts  and is a man to avoid – or so you’d think on first appearances…  

Hex is arguably the most memorable western comic character ever created. He’s certainly the darkest and most grippingly realised, as is the brutal and uncompromising world he inhabits. His 21st century revival portrayed him as a ruthless demon with gun or knife, hunting men for the price on their heads in the years following the American civil war.  

This collection (reprinting issues #13-18 of the 2006 monthly series) revisits his origin and offers fascinating insights not only in gripping lead tale ‘Retribution’ – illustrated by the utterly superb Jordi Bernet – but also in haunting, nihilistically evocative cautionary tale ‘The Ballad of Tallulah Black’ (beguiling painted by Phil Noto), and blackly comedic ‘I Walk Alone’, drawn with unsuspected subtlety by Val Semeiks. 

Jonah Hex was always the “Western for people who didn’t like Westerns” and cliché aside, it’s still true. This is a perfect book for any adult beginning or returning to comics. 
© 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. 

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Lone Wolf & Cub volume 4: The Bell Warden


By Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, translated by Dana Lewis (Dark Horse Manga) 

ISBN: 978-1-56971-505-5 (TPB/digital edition) 

Best known in the West as Lone Wolf and Cub, the epic Samurai saga created by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima is without doubt a global classic of comics literature. An example of the popular “Chanbara” or “sword-fighting” genre of print and screen, Kozure Okami was serialised in Weekly Manga Action from September 1970 until April 1976. It was an immense and overwhelming “Seinen” (“Men’s manga”) hit… 

The tales prompted thematic companion series Kubikiri Asa (Samurai Executioner) which ran from 1972-1976, but the major draw – at home and, increasingly, abroad – was always the nomadic wanderings of doomed noble ÅŒgami Ittō and his solemn, silent child. 

Revered and influential, Kozure Okami was followed after years of supplication by fans and editors by sequel Shin Lone Wolf & Cub (illustrated by Hideki Mori) and even spawned – through Koike’s indirect participation – science fiction homage Lone Wolf 2100 by Mike Kennedy & Francisco Ruiz Velasco. 

The original saga has been successfully adapted to most other media, spawning movies, plays, TV series (plural), games and merchandise. The property is infamously still in Hollywood pre-production. 

The several thousand pages of enthralling, exotic, intoxicating narrative art produced by these legendary creators eventually filled 28 collected volumes, beguiling generations of readers in Japan and, inevitably, the world. More importantly, their philosophically nihilistic odyssey – with its timeless themes and iconic visuals – has influenced hordes of other creators. The many manga, comics and movies these stories have inspired around the globe are impossible to count. Frank Miller, who illustrated the cover of this edition, referenced the series in Daredevil, his dystopian opus Ronin, The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City. Max Allan Collin’s Road to Perdition is a proudly unashamed tribute to the masterpiece of vengeance-fiction. Stan Sakai has superbly spoofed, pastiched and celebrated the wanderer’s path in his own epic Usagi Yojimbo, and even children’s cartoon shows such as Samurai Jack are direct descendants of this astounding achievement of graphic narrative. The material has become part of a shared world culture. 

In the West, we first saw the translated tales in 1987, as 45 Prestige Format editions from First Comics. That innovative trailblazer foundered before getting even a third of the way through the vast canon, after which Dark Horse Comics assumed the rights, systematically reprinting and translating the entire epic into 28 tankōbon-style editions of about 300 pages each, between September 2000-December 2002. Once the entire epic was translated, it was all placed online through the Dark Horse Digital project. 

Following a cautionary ‘Note to Readers’ – on stylistic interpretation – this moodily morbid monochrome collection truly gets underway, keeping many terms and concepts western readers may find unfamiliar. Therefore this edition offers at the close a Glossary providing detailed context on the term used in the stories, plus profiles of author Koike Kazuo & illustrator Kojima Goseki and another instalment of ‘The Ronin Report’ by Tim Ervin-Gore. The occasional series of articles here offers a rundown on exotic weaponry of the era in Weapons Glossary: Part one…  

Set in the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the saga concerns a foredoomed wandering killer who was once the Shogun’s official executioner: capable of cleaving a man in half with one stroke. An eminent individual of esteemed imperial standing, elevated social position and impeccable honour, ÅŒgami Ittō lost it all and now roams feudal Japan as a doomed soul hellbent for the dire, demon-haunted underworld of Meifumado. 

When the noble’s wife was murdered and his clan dishonoured due to the machinations of the treacherous, politically ambitious Yagyu Clan, the Emperor ordered ÅŒgami to commit suicide. Instead, he rebelled, choosing to be a despised Ronin (masterless samurai) assassin, pledged to revenge himself until all his betrayers were dead …or Hell claimed him. His son, toddler Daigoro, also chose the path of destruction and together they roam grimly evocative landscapes of feudal Japan, one step ahead of doom, with death behind and before them. 

Unflinching formula informs early episodes: the acceptance of a commission to kill an impossible target necessitates forging a cunning plan where relentless determination leads to inevitable success. Throughout each episode plot is underscored with bleak philosophical musings alternately informed by Buddhist teachings in conjunction with or in opposition to the unflinching personal honour code of Bushido… 

That tactic is eschewed for a simple commission in opening tale ‘Tsuji Genshichi the Bell Warden’ with the assassin hired by a prestigious and honourable official. Greater Edo runs to the timetable of nine great bells, dictating the flow of civilised time and acting as emergency alarm system in times of crisis. All that power and responsibility is controlled by one man: The Bell Warden. 

As with most hereditary official posts, great glory and vast wealth inevitably accrues to the position, but now the aging incumbent is preparing his successor. He has three candidates and grave misgivings about the worth and dedication of each. His solution: hire the most infamous outlaw in Japan to chop off the right (bell-ringing) arm. If they can’t survive and overcome they are none of them the man for the job… 

Drowning in his own ocean of duty, ÅŒgami accepts the commission and isn’t surprised to discover there is a hidden agenda in play… 

As the nation modernised – or lost its ethical core – noble samurai economised by firing their retainers and hiring domestic mercenaries. As this new class – “Chugen-Gashira” – grew in power, they feathered their own nests; increasingly turning to villainy and chicanery, further debasing Japan’s moral core. They were shielded by their own base-born origins, since upholders of the old ways could not “punch down” to retaliate.  

In ‘Unfaithful Retainers’, when two noble children seek redress for their father’s assault, the Lone Wolf also falls foul of his own entrenched self-image, and must concoct a byzantine scheme to reach the guilty party and deliver honourable justice…  

Daigoro takes centre stage in ‘Parting Frost’ as his father goes missing during a mission. As his supplies run out and winter snows start to melt , the boy is compelled to strike out in search of his father, only to encounter a Samurai who discerns exactly who and what he is. Testing the child to destruction with fire and steel, obsessive Iki Jizamon is only foiled by the abrupt return of the cub’s far from happy sire… 

Set in a brutal uncompromising world of privilege and misogyny, these episodes are unflinching and explicit in their treatment of violence – especially sexual violence. In detailing another historical aspect of the culture, ‘Performer’ focusses on a particular underclass: Gōmune. The term grouped together all street folk who busked for money: female minstrels, dancers, sleight-of-hand conjurers, weapons-demonstrators, kabuki actors, drummers, travelling players puppeteers, preachers, contortionists, storytellers acrobat and countless others all entertaining for coins. Naturally, they had no protection under law and when a swordswoman martial artist was brutalised by woman-hating warrior using treachery and hypnotism, she was unavenged… 

In her shame and fury, O-Yuki had her body further desecrated by horrific, attention-diverting tattoos, giving her a momentary advantage as she butchered a succession of Samurai on her way to finding one in particular… 

Accepting a commission from a lord rapidly being depleted of soldier-servants, Ōgami plays detective but finds himself deeply conflicted when he finally corners his prey. However, his given word is inviolate, his philosophy is unflinching and a job must be done… 

These stories are deeply metaphorical and work on many levels most of us westerners just won’t grasp on first reading – even with contextual aid provided by the bonus features. That only makes them more exotic and fascinating. Also a little unsettling is the even-handed treatment of women in the tales. Within the confines of the notoriously stratified culture being depicted, females – from servants to courtesans, prostitutes to highborn ladies – are all fully rounded characters, with their own motivations and drives. The wolf’s female allies are valiant and dependable, and his foes, whether targets or mere enemy combatants in his path, are treated with professional respect. He kills them just as if they were men… 

Whichever English transliteration you prefer – Wolf and Baby Carriage is what I was first introduced to – Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima’s grandiose, thought-provoking, hell-bent Samurai tragedy is one of those too-rare breakthrough classics of global comics literature. A breathtaking tour de force, these are comics you must not miss. 

© 1995, 2000 Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima. All other material © 2000 Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Cover art © 2000 Frank Miller. All rights reserved.Â