Customer Reviews

Cities of the Fantastic: The Invisible Frontier Vol. 1

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This book is pretty much a must for lovers of Euro-comics. The series (LES CITES OBSCURES, here translated as "Cities of the Fantastic"), while regretably not entirely available in English, stands as a classic of sophisticated Euro-comics. But each also stands on its own, so you needn't worry about about ever being lost.

This volume's story focuses on a young, capable but not brilliant character amidst a time and place of historical and cultural turmoil. Be prepared to ask yourself how cartography influences culture and cultures' manifest destiny. If that's not a question you can imagine contemplating, this isn't for you; if it is, this is a delight.

Of course, you can always whip over to amazon.fr and get it in the French original...

-- Julian Darius, Sequart.com (for sophisticated study of comic books and graphic novels)

In volume 1 of this series, a young mapmaker (Roland) sets out across a ruined wasteland toward his life's ambition, the Cartography Center, the place where geography is recorded and made useful to the citizens of Sodrovno.

Despite the cathedral-like scale of the Center, its population has dwindled over the years - until recently. New faces, new techniques, and new goals arrive, driven by the Supreme Leader's expansionism. Mysterious Shkodra arrives on Roland's landscape as well, a Center prostitute who presents a cartographic mystery of her own.

Then, in volume 2, Roland returns from vacation to find bigger changes under way. He has been assigned the section chief position held by his former mentor, who has vanished without comment. Roland becomes ever more unsure of his world, however. Errors in maps, anathema to his precise soul, arise systematically. At the same time, Roland becomes convinced that an omen lies in lovely Shkodra and the birthmark that covers so much of her body. He becomes obsessed with deciphering that omen (incidentally enjoying the body on which nature painted it) and saving the Cartographic Center from ruin.

As in others of Schuiten's stories, action remains low-key when present at all. Instead, delicate art and a subdued palette create sense of foreboding amid the mysteries that the story chooses to leave mysterious. The final events of this series remove the certainty from underneath everything that went before. The more I think about this story, the more possible meanings I find in the gorgeous artwork of this graphic novel.

-- wiredweird

(Note: Any review to either volume in this series gets applied to both volumes. Not my idea, it's Amazon policy as of this writing.)