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dhampyresa) wrote2016-01-25 08:44 pm
dhampyresa) wrote2016-01-25 08:44 pm
2015's last Reading Wednesday (2/6): French comics read in English
These comics were originally published in French, then translated and published in English at a later date.
What did you finish reading?
Chronicles of Legion 1-3, by Fabien Nury (scenario), Mathieu Lauffray, Mario Alberti, Zhang Xiaoyu and Tirso Cons (all four on art): This is a four volume series (of which I have read all 4 in French and only the first 3 in English). It's also a prequel to Je Suis Legion, but quite frankly I like it better than Je Suis Legion.
There are four artists because the books follow four different time periods: Victorian England, Napoleonic Wars, Conquistadores and, I guess you could call this "everything else"?
Anyway, the concept of the story is that both Vlad and Radu (those guys) are BODY HORROR VAMPIRES CHASING EACH OTHER ALL OVER HISTORY :D
You may have noticed I have A Thing for vampires. I don't exactly make a secret about it *points at username*. I have read A LOT about vampires. Like, a lot a lot. I read Dracula. I read Carmilla. I read the Twilight books before they got big. I saw Nosferatu. Also, did you know Bela Lugosi was literally buried in his Dracula cape? /vampire hipster
Anyway, point is, there's nothing I love more than a story that does interesting things with vampires, whether that's by taking the "usual" set-up and doing fun stuff with it (see Day Men in this entry) or putting a spin on the concept of vampires.
Chronicles of Legion takes the later approach. Vlad, our protagonist, is not sensitive to sunlight or running water or crosses garlick or wild roses or anything you might think a vampire would be susceptible too. That's because Vlad's still human. Well. Kind of. Vlad's blood is a parasite that takes over the mind and body of his host(s). The hosts are still human, but Vlad himself is immortal.
Vlad's control of his hosts isn't limited to human hosts: there's at least on bit where his sole host is a rat. This has interesting effects on his thought processes. All of Vlad's hosts affects how he thinks and stick around in a way -- there's even a rather sweet bit where he reflects that his former and curent hosts are now forever together (as part of his kind of gestalt consciousness).
Vlad can control several beings at once, but both he and Radu usually have one "main" host -- although we don't see Radu as much as Vlad and places seem to suggest he does things differently. Vlad is also able to give his hosts control of themselves if he wants. As far as I can tell, once they lose the initial fight for their own mind it's over for them and he calls the shots.
(The most body horror thing in the entire series is what Radu did with himself once in "the New World". It's pretty clever of link the vampire blood drinking to Mesoamerican bloodletting but OMG RADU WTF. (Not spoiling it because it's a great, creepy reveal, but if you want details, I can give details.))
This isn't to say Vlad isn't creepy -- Vlad is plenty creepy -- but Radu is the creepier of the two. I think part of the reason for this is that it's a prequel to Je Suis Legion and Radu is basically a creepy plotpoint with no sense of self in that. I read Je Suis Legion just the once and I didn't like it that much so I don't really remember details. I do know that it ends with maybe!Vlad and maybe!Radu sailing away from war torn 1940s Europe into the sunset together and implied to be on good terms now. (But iirc even though they are still immortals, Vlad and Radu might not be the dominant personalities anymore?) Je Suis Legion involves Nazis trying to harness Radu's power to control people and I think the reason Radu is so creepy in this is to explain why his power is so much more wide ranging than Vlad's (answer: practice, basically).
I don't have much to say about either the "everything else" or the Victorian timelines, except that Vlad apparently took over Byron at some point, lmao.
The Conquistadores timeline is pretty interesting and not just because it's the only one where Vlad possesses a woman. Vlad goes to South America to escape Radu, only to find that Radu is already there. Oops. There's also a subplot involving a priest from the Inquisition convinced that Vlad's host is possessed. There is also a romance between Vlad-in-a-woman's body and a guy. There are two other romance-ish plotlines, one of which is heterosexual, the other of which is queer. Not spoiling that last one because it's bittersweet when you find out.
For the record, Vlad's hosts -- at least the main ones -- have a birthmark on the back of their necks that is both massive and distinctive. Radu's hosts have a different one, just as massive and distinctive. (It is eventually revealed how Vald and Radu got to be immortal, in a scene that implies there might be another (or more) immortals but we never actually meet them, besides the potential one in that scene which I think might be supposed to be Ahasuerus.)
The Napoleonic timeline is my faaaaaaaaaaaaavourite. Vlad is the captain of a bunch of soldiers and the art is amazing. There's a scene where they're gathered around horses frozen in a lake that's gorgeous. Vlad convinces them to defect and go looking for "Vlad the Impaler's gold" (that he tells us wrily is actually in a Swiss bank where he put it decades ago). Two of the soldiers are brothers, one of which at one point takes a bad fall and Vlad mercykills him. The dialog with the other brother goes something like "If it were your brother, captain?" / "If it was my brother, I'd do it myself." I AM SO THERE FOR MESSED UP VLAD AND RADU FEELINGS especially since Vlad and Radu meet up soon after that and negotiate a truce of some sort.
It's a pretty good comic book series, I have to say. (Y'all know that you can always ask me if specific things you do/don't want to read about are present in stuff I read, right?)
I read the English version this time around because I wanted to know if the English translation held up. Good news,hokuton_punch ! It does.
The Infinite Loop 1 + 2, by Pierrick Colinet (writing) and Elsa Charretier (art): I read this in English because I am an idiot and didn't realise it was by French people until Jean Jaurès showed up and I went "US authors using Jean Jaurès to prove a point??? THE FUCK". You would have thought that with names like PIERRICK COLINET and ELSA CHARRETIER I would have guessed they were French, but lmao I did not.
The Infinite Loop is about agents from a time agency who have to fix holes in the fabric of the timespace continuum. Sometimes these holes manifest as physical anomalies. Our heroine meets the first human anomaly and decides not to kill her until she can ascertain the morality of this.
Then they fall in love.
Then stuff happens and there are gun fights and breaking of realities and yes, Jean Jaurès used to make a point. The assassination of Jean Jaurès threw France headfirst into WW1, btw. (Incidentally, he was also one of the driving forces behind the separation of Church and State.)
I liked the resolution of the story, even though the science doesn't quite hold together -- but it's not a hard SF story, so it doesn't matter as much that the science's been wonky since the beginning.
The book treads the line between LGBT comic with time travel in it and time travel comic with LGBT themes/characters in it, which is fine by me. (I could have done with the only non-binary character not being so as a reult of a computer bug -- they're cool and cool with it, but still.)
It's interesting that a lot of the references are either opaque to a US audience (Jean Jaurès) or opaque to a French audience (Emmett Till) in such a way that very few have crossover 'appeal'. Once I'd noticed this it felt like the book didn't know what its audience was. Idk, it's odd.
Still, the art is pretty and the story's fine.
What are you reading now?
Lots of stuff! I really want to talk about the conclusion for Secret Wars and Le Déchronologue (OMG IT IS SO AMAZING SERIOUSLY Y'ALL SO GOOD), but that's wait until I'm done with this 2015 recap. List broken down so I can do something else with my day(s).
Up next for the recaps are:
What are you reading next?
Not sure. At some point I should add the boo, recs I got from fandomstocking to the to-read list. I need to work on reducing my to-read list, seriously.
What did you finish reading?
Chronicles of Legion 1-3, by Fabien Nury (scenario), Mathieu Lauffray, Mario Alberti, Zhang Xiaoyu and Tirso Cons (all four on art): This is a four volume series (of which I have read all 4 in French and only the first 3 in English). It's also a prequel to Je Suis Legion, but quite frankly I like it better than Je Suis Legion.
There are four artists because the books follow four different time periods: Victorian England, Napoleonic Wars, Conquistadores and, I guess you could call this "everything else"?
Anyway, the concept of the story is that both Vlad and Radu (those guys) are BODY HORROR VAMPIRES CHASING EACH OTHER ALL OVER HISTORY :D
You may have noticed I have A Thing for vampires. I don't exactly make a secret about it *points at username*. I have read A LOT about vampires. Like, a lot a lot. I read Dracula. I read Carmilla. I read the Twilight books before they got big. I saw Nosferatu. Also, did you know Bela Lugosi was literally buried in his Dracula cape? /vampire hipster
Anyway, point is, there's nothing I love more than a story that does interesting things with vampires, whether that's by taking the "usual" set-up and doing fun stuff with it (see Day Men in this entry) or putting a spin on the concept of vampires.
Chronicles of Legion takes the later approach. Vlad, our protagonist, is not sensitive to sunlight or running water or crosses garlick or wild roses or anything you might think a vampire would be susceptible too. That's because Vlad's still human. Well. Kind of. Vlad's blood is a parasite that takes over the mind and body of his host(s). The hosts are still human, but Vlad himself is immortal.
Vlad's control of his hosts isn't limited to human hosts: there's at least on bit where his sole host is a rat. This has interesting effects on his thought processes. All of Vlad's hosts affects how he thinks and stick around in a way -- there's even a rather sweet bit where he reflects that his former and curent hosts are now forever together (as part of his kind of gestalt consciousness).
Vlad can control several beings at once, but both he and Radu usually have one "main" host -- although we don't see Radu as much as Vlad and places seem to suggest he does things differently. Vlad is also able to give his hosts control of themselves if he wants. As far as I can tell, once they lose the initial fight for their own mind it's over for them and he calls the shots.
(The most body horror thing in the entire series is what Radu did with himself once in "the New World". It's pretty clever of link the vampire blood drinking to Mesoamerican bloodletting but OMG RADU WTF. (Not spoiling it because it's a great, creepy reveal, but if you want details, I can give details.))
This isn't to say Vlad isn't creepy -- Vlad is plenty creepy -- but Radu is the creepier of the two. I think part of the reason for this is that it's a prequel to Je Suis Legion and Radu is basically a creepy plotpoint with no sense of self in that. I read Je Suis Legion just the once and I didn't like it that much so I don't really remember details. I do know that it ends with maybe!Vlad and maybe!Radu sailing away from war torn 1940s Europe into the sunset together and implied to be on good terms now. (But iirc even though they are still immortals, Vlad and Radu might not be the dominant personalities anymore?) Je Suis Legion involves Nazis trying to harness Radu's power to control people and I think the reason Radu is so creepy in this is to explain why his power is so much more wide ranging than Vlad's (answer: practice, basically).
I don't have much to say about either the "everything else" or the Victorian timelines, except that Vlad apparently took over Byron at some point, lmao.
The Conquistadores timeline is pretty interesting and not just because it's the only one where Vlad possesses a woman. Vlad goes to South America to escape Radu, only to find that Radu is already there. Oops. There's also a subplot involving a priest from the Inquisition convinced that Vlad's host is possessed. There is also a romance between Vlad-in-a-woman's body and a guy. There are two other romance-ish plotlines, one of which is heterosexual, the other of which is queer. Not spoiling that last one because it's bittersweet when you find out.
For the record, Vlad's hosts -- at least the main ones -- have a birthmark on the back of their necks that is both massive and distinctive. Radu's hosts have a different one, just as massive and distinctive. (It is eventually revealed how Vald and Radu got to be immortal, in a scene that implies there might be another (or more) immortals but we never actually meet them, besides the potential one in that scene which I think might be supposed to be Ahasuerus.)
The Napoleonic timeline is my faaaaaaaaaaaaavourite. Vlad is the captain of a bunch of soldiers and the art is amazing. There's a scene where they're gathered around horses frozen in a lake that's gorgeous. Vlad convinces them to defect and go looking for "Vlad the Impaler's gold" (that he tells us wrily is actually in a Swiss bank where he put it decades ago). Two of the soldiers are brothers, one of which at one point takes a bad fall and Vlad mercykills him. The dialog with the other brother goes something like "If it were your brother, captain?" / "If it was my brother, I'd do it myself." I AM SO THERE FOR MESSED UP VLAD AND RADU FEELINGS especially since Vlad and Radu meet up soon after that and negotiate a truce of some sort.
It's a pretty good comic book series, I have to say. (Y'all know that you can always ask me if specific things you do/don't want to read about are present in stuff I read, right?)
I read the English version this time around because I wanted to know if the English translation held up. Good news,
hokuton_punch ! It does.The Infinite Loop 1 + 2, by Pierrick Colinet (writing) and Elsa Charretier (art): I read this in English because I am an idiot and didn't realise it was by French people until Jean Jaurès showed up and I went "US authors using Jean Jaurès to prove a point??? THE FUCK". You would have thought that with names like PIERRICK COLINET and ELSA CHARRETIER I would have guessed they were French, but lmao I did not.
The Infinite Loop is about agents from a time agency who have to fix holes in the fabric of the timespace continuum. Sometimes these holes manifest as physical anomalies. Our heroine meets the first human anomaly and decides not to kill her until she can ascertain the morality of this.
Then they fall in love.
Then stuff happens and there are gun fights and breaking of realities and yes, Jean Jaurès used to make a point. The assassination of Jean Jaurès threw France headfirst into WW1, btw. (Incidentally, he was also one of the driving forces behind the separation of Church and State.)
I liked the resolution of the story, even though the science doesn't quite hold together -- but it's not a hard SF story, so it doesn't matter as much that the science's been wonky since the beginning.
The book treads the line between LGBT comic with time travel in it and time travel comic with LGBT themes/characters in it, which is fine by me. (I could have done with the only non-binary character not being so as a reult of a computer bug -- they're cool and cool with it, but still.)
It's interesting that a lot of the references are either opaque to a US audience (Jean Jaurès) or opaque to a French audience (Emmett Till) in such a way that very few have crossover 'appeal'. Once I'd noticed this it felt like the book didn't know what its audience was. Idk, it's odd.
Still, the art is pretty and the story's fine.
What are you reading now?
Lots of stuff! I really want to talk about the conclusion for Secret Wars and Le Déchronologue (OMG IT IS SO AMAZING SERIOUSLY Y'ALL SO GOOD), but that's wait until I'm done with this 2015 recap. List broken down so I can do something else with my day(s).
Up next for the recaps are:
- Books read in French
- Chats d'oeuvre
- D'un monde à l'autre (La Quête d'Ewilan, tome 1)
- Le Jardin des silences
- Comics read in English
- Lucifer v1 (Vertigo comic)
- Prince of Cats
- Sandman Overture
- Spider-Gwen v1
- The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl v1
- Books read in English
- Fragile Things
- Magnus Chase and the Sword of Asgard
- The Red Pyramid
- Books about Ancient Dead People
- Darkness Over Cannae
- Le papyrus de César
- Tumulte à Rome
What are you reading next?
Not sure. At some point I should add the boo, recs I got from fandomstocking to the to-read list. I need to work on reducing my to-read list, seriously.
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