I splurged again this month in terms of buying comics 😱 Les 5 Terres - L’intégrale en édition limitée I discovered “Les 5 Terres” recently, I liked volume 1. As I was talking about it briefly on the Bubble Facebook group, an absolute fan told me about the release of a limited edition complete. It’s a thick volume with a very nice hardback cover, dust jacket, 6 bookplates signed by the authors, with a limited edition of 280 copies at the modest price of… 235 €!

Here are some reading notes from the last three days. Setting the context: for most series I read very spaced out, I have a hard time fully memorizing the story, characters, unresolved ongoing plots… And sometimes when I start a new volume, I don’t know who so-and-so is, if what’s-his-name is good, bad or ambiguous, etc. 😅 That’s what happened to me on several comics here. Umbrella Academy T3 I loved the Netflix series, funny, crazy.

Introduction In these paradoxically obscurantist times, even though science, society and knowledge progress faster than ever, I think the following three readings are a must. Human knowledge is progressing in all fields, whether in hard sciences or in social sciences, the world is globally more and more at peace, we have more and more factual information at our disposal… And yet there are more and more people who believe in conspiracy theories, each one more stupid than the other!

Note : Article published with delay. Death Note artbook I am a fan of Death Note. It was only natural that I would fall for a great artbook of Takeshi Obata’s works! There are drawings from Death Note as well as other works by him that I don’t know. And everything is splendid! Death Note Short stories Some short stories in the universe of Death Note a few years after the main plot and humorous strips.

Some opinions on my recent readings: Blacksad volume 6 I really liked it. It is in the continuity of the previous ones, I find the same drawing, the same atmosphere, the suspense and the twists. I think it is on the level of the previous ones, I am just a little frustrated to have to wait for volume 7 with a cliffhanger. Les vieux fourneaux volume 2 I started the series with a lot of delay because despite the good reviews I had seen, the cover with the old and ugly characters didn’t make me want to read it… I bought the volume 1 second hand and I didn’t regret it!

Here is an ideal book in times of confinement or curfew, a novel of 960 pages! But at the same time, who wants to spontaneously start reading a book by a German author, Uwe Tellkamp, a surgeon born in the former GDR, who tells the story of his childhood and the end of the GDR? In principle, not me! But the circumstances are however particular, it’s a friend and ex-colleague who offered it to me 😃 She was born in Dresden, the place where almost all the action of the book takes place.

After the plethora of MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) movies and the WandaVision series I saw on Disney+ recently, a visit to a large Parisian bookstore specialized in seen on Disney+ recently, a visit to a big Parisian bookstore specialized in comics could only end with the purchase of this little booklet published by Panini. I naively thought that it would allow me to better discover this strange couple… Disappointing! So yes I laughed a lot, but in the second degree.

🇫🇷 Simonac ! Tu veux-tu améliorer ton vocabulaire québécois tout en lisant une histoire émouvante ? Alors lis donc « Paul à Québec ». Note: I really don’t know if this comic book has been translated to English or even if it’d be as fun to read, because it’s full of typically French Canadian expressions and slang. This comic book is part of a series written by an award-winning author from the Québec province of Canada.

I have finally realized a teenager’s dream, whose origin goes back to the release of the Canadian film “Heavy Metal”, produced by Ivan Reitman and released in 1981 😍. This animated film, which had strongly marked me at the time, made me discover the French magazine Métal Hurlant. I already talked a bit about this magazine in another article. I was too young to read it at the time (11 years old) and was therefore only 5 years old when the first issue came out in 1975.

I finished this comic book after 2 days of reading it and it’s a shock! 😱 It’s a realistic painting of the dark side of the USA, the one we hear little or nothing about for some of the stories gathered here. The author of the book that was used as a reference is a pacifist, this can be felt in the choice of the events told, but that does not take anything away from their strength and scope.

Updated in April 2021 with “Dark Victory”. A Long Halloween Batman: A long Halloween (Un long Halloween) by Jeph Loeb & Time Sale was recommended to me by Batman fans in the Bubble Family & Friends Facebook group, a forum used by users of the excellent Bubble application that I use to manage my BD/Comics/Manga collection. Note: This book is a fantastic American comics, I will therefore write this critics in English although I read it in French 🙂

Note : Article from 2019 that I had not posted. Dark reading with Le journal d’un ingénu by Émile Bravo. This volume, the first of a series by Bravo, is part of the “reboots” of Spirou by contemporary authors. Émile Bravo tells here the genesis of Spirou, his unhappy childhood, why he chose to keep his hotel bellboy costume even as an adult, where his squirrel comes from… It’s quite dark in spite of the humor and the little love story, we are on the eve of World War II and Poland and Germany are secretly negotiating an agreement to avoid war in the hotel where Spirou works, in vain as we already know.

I’m not a big reader of American Comics, I really have very few of them, but since a few months ago our local comic bookstore (BD Geek in Antony, I highly recommend it) was celebrating Batman’s 80th birthday by offering a comic for the purchase of 2 Batman comics, I went there with my daughter, and we each chose one book. My choice was this “reboot” of the genesis of Batman by Frank Miller.

Let’s dive in comics and Sci Fi at the same time with Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal in English)! For those who don’t know, Métal Hurlant, published between 1975 and 1987, then briefly from 2002 to 2004, is the reference comic / Sci Fi magazine that revolutionized contemporary comics at a time when comics were rather aimed at children, nice, familial, polished, smooth (Tintin, Asterix, Tanguy and Laverdure…). Mythical authors such as Moebius, Caza, Bilal, Druillet, Giger, Tardi… have written and drawn in it.