The Hollow Grounds [Paperback]

Luc Schuiten (Author), Francois Schuiten (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A bicyclist on a glass road has trouble not dissolving into a series of cubes. A woman finds an upside-down world beneath the world she lives in. While looking for her, her best friend visits a world of men who live according to an unbreakable law of symmetry. The narrative threads of the various SF stories collected here aren’t always easy to follow, but there’s no doubt the authors have some mad ideas worthy of Alan Moore or Grant Morrison at their trippiest, combined with an emphasis on the sexual practices of these worlds that will remind some of Barbarella. While the writing (or maybe the translation) isn’t always up to conveying the more outrageous concepts that the Schuiten brothers have dreamed up, fortunately the art is. François’s lines and colors are always clear, even when depicting surreal concepts like "sculptraces" (sculptures that look like rotoscoped motion), or the disintegration of some characters into their component geometric shapes. The coloring is a little muddy, seemingly a result of reducing the original album-sized works to trade paperback size for the American market, but it does not affect the clarity of the storytelling at all. Most importantly, this work gives the sense of an alien but fully realized and internally consistent world, offering dazzling and original visuals, even if the interest in bare-breasted young women occasionally overwhelms the SF concepts.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In the 1980s, Francois Schuiten collaborated with his brother, Luc, who had introduced him to comics in his childhood, on a graphic-novel trilogy set on hollow planets that contain different societies on concentric outer surfaces. Upper- and lower-level societies interact only accidentally, as when an upper-level inhabitant breaks through her world's floor and the lower level's ceiling in part two, "Zara," although winged humanoids, separate from all wingless societies, travel between planets as well as levels, at least in part one, "Carapace." The six stories of "Carapace" and the single stories "Zara" and "Nogegon" are all concerned with sexual desire, because Francois draws slender young women so beautifully as well as because there is strict sexual segregation on some planets. Francois' delight in architecture, perspective, and flight is also highly evident. While the long stories are in Francois' technically impeccably drawn comics style, those of "Carapace" show him experimenting with softer delineation and painterly color effects. If Dali had done comics, they may have looked like this. Exquisite. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Humanoids - Rebellion (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401203647
• ISBN-13: 978-1401203641
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great art- poorly served by DC, May 5, 2005

By 

Bruce Donley "procolharum" (Memphis, TN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hollow Grounds (Paperback)

This paperback is a compilation of three hardcover oversized albums first released by Humanoids Press: "Carapaces", "Zara", and "Nogegon". ("Nogegon" with its beautiful palindromic structure was nominated for a 2002 Eisner award.) The print quality and beauty of these volumes has suffered greatly at the hands of DC, who started distributing European Humanoids titles in 2004- and has in May 2005 already announced that they will stop doing so! Apparently DC has no clue how to market and properly print "non-superhero" art: half-size washed-out reproduction on poor-quality paper, and shoehorning these three separate titles into a single paperback, is an injustice to the artist. Please try to find the original hardcover Humanoids volumes instead, and also check out the Schuiten/Peeters "Obscure Cities" titles released by NBM, an American publishing house that really knows how to treat this incredibly beautiful work in a respectful way. Then you will understand why Schuiten is one of the most revered and awarded "comic" artists in Europe. 5 stars for art and story + 1 star for DC's poor effort= 3 stars

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mad Genius?, March 14, 2006

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Hollow Grounds (Paperback)

This book is a little bit confusing because it's actually a collection of three books that were published separately in the original French editions over the course of 15 years (1980-1995). Furthermore, the first section/book (Carapaces) is itself a collection of six short stories -- so it all gets a little complicated for the reader. Not to mention that the worlds imagined by the French creators are so strange and surreal that they almost qualify as conceptual art. Sci-fi or graphic art fans with a taste for the offbeat may well enjoy this import and those looking for traditional narratives are hereby warned. It should be noted that while the drawing is quite nice, especially strong in capturing the human form and architectural elements (which often show a distinct art nouveau influence), the coloring and reproduction is pretty awful. Most of the book is very murky and dirty looking, and a somewhat cramped, as if the original art had been shrunken down a bit. It should also be noted that this is definitely an adult book, as there is copious amount of female nudity, and a few sexual scenes and situations.

Desire is the theme of the first section/book, "Carapaces", as each of the six stories is built on one person's desire for another. The first of these, "Shells" is possibly the most effective, as two humanoid figures in a post-apocalyptic landscape frolic and tease one another. Their desire overwhelms them, and for the first time ever, they remove their metal protection to have skin-on-skin sex -- which is when the insects show up... "Stampede" and "Sample" are much more abstract, while in "Crevice" a sentient and partly organic subterranean computer/entity splits the earth to be able to touch a woman. The final, and longest story, is "The Fog Cutter", set in a world where fog can roll in and freeze in place. The town's "fog cutter" is the person responsible for freeing trapped people from the fog, but he'd rather be left in piece to finish a giant nude statue of the woman he yearns for.

The second section/book is "Zara", which takes place in a planet whose outer shell rotates very quickly on the outside, and has a stable inner shell where people live vertically. It's rather bizarre and hard to explain, but the story basically follows one woman who crosses from the outer world to the inner, only to discover a village of sapphic women who've not seen a man in fifty or more years. Meanwhile, on another planet, a group of men without women learn of the same inner world and teleport themselves there in order to rape and plunder. It's an interesting, weird, adventure story, some parts of which are very modern, and some of which are totally old-fashioned pulp. The final section/book is the widely acclaimed experimental "Nogegon". It brings together elements and characters from "The Fog Cutter" and "Zara" in strange story that is all about symmetry. It's very hard to explain, but essentially, the story of one woman's search for her friend is exactly symmetrical. The search proceeds normally enough to the halfway point, and then it all doubles back upon itself in a mirror reflection. Very odd and impressive in the same way a mad genius is -- as is the entire book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Schuiten Deserves the Best, October 13, 2005

By 

Bumpkin Boy - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Hollow Grounds (Paperback)

The artwork is fantastic. I wish the quality of publication - the vividness of the colors - was as good as the original printing of these stories in Heavy Metal magazine. It's worth getting, just not as high quality as other published work by Schuiten. The printing job doesn't do justice to the subject.