Latah by Thomas Legrain

First published in France in 2023; published in translation by Europe Comics on April 26, 2023

Latah is a graphic novel. Thomas Legrain is a Belgian artist/writer. The original edition is in French.

Huyn Tran, an AP reporter, is dropped off in a Vietnamese jungle where he joins a squad of American soldiers. When he sees the figurine a soldier is carrying, he says “Latah.” The expression refers to an affliction caused by shock or trauma. Sufferers go wild, change physically, and inspire fear. But Latah is also a spirit incarnated in a man that people in the region worship because Latah bears the burden of the suffering that people would otherwise experience. When the suffering becomes too great, Latah goes on a killing spree until it finds a new host. The soldier’s figurine is a talisman that protects against Latah.

A couple of soldiers are lost in a firefight before they find their way to a field of corpses. The mangled bodies remind Tran of stories about the war with the French. The soldiers soldier on until they stumble into a place where the sun never sets, where their compasses don’t work, where they die one by one. Not a good time to be a soldier, as if there was ever a good time to be carrying weapons through the jungles of Vietnam.

The squad was involved in something bad before the story starts, something they don’t want to talk about and that seems to be tearing them apart. Readers who remember the Vietnam War will guess what they did. The story raises collateral issues of race, primarily in the form of Black soldiers who bicker with each while white soldiers mock them. Tran is subject to the racist attitudes of American soldiers. At the same time, a white soldier wonders whether a Black soldier who attended the March on Washington would ever be willing to listen to a redneck from Alabama.

The redneck is more mature than most of the other soldiers; he questions the morality of dropping napalm and ruining the lives of innocent farmers in the hope of driving the Viet Cong to more favorable fighting terrain. He’s the only soldier with the decency to feel guilt about the squad’s earlier actions. Fortunately for the redneck, he’s carrying the figurine. Unfortunately for him, another soldier wants to take it from him.

The art is gritty and atmospheric. The olive drab coloring in the background of most panels sets the right mood. The detail in jungle backgrounds is meticulous, although the detail of soldiers ripped to shreds might be a bit too detailed for weak stomachs. I particularly like the monsoon rains that last for panel after panel. The art gives the story a cinematic feel.

The story loses some of its power with a predictable flashback at the end. After arriving at a conclusion, the story seems incomplete, perhaps because the horror of the supernatural is overshadowed by the horror of the Vietnam War. I nevertheless appreciated the way the art enhances an unmemorable story.

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Slava: After the Fall by Pierre-Henry Gomont

First published in France in 2022; published in translation by Europe Comics on January 25, 2023

This graphic novel is set in the 1990s. Russia has transitioned from a country of corrupt government officials controlling the means of production to one of corrupt oligarchs controlling a privatized economy. Slava Segalov “grew up in a world where ‘salesman’ meant ‘scammer’.” He aspired to be a starving artist but, after he tired of starving, joined his childhood friend, Dimitri Lavrin, in the business of  looting abandoned Soviet buildings. Dimitri steals goods to sell to Russian consumers who are eager to own the things they always coveted. While Slava was once a student of philosophy and art, Dimitri — a lifelong grifter — is teaching Slava to be a capitalist (i.e., thief).

Slava and Dimitri are driving a van full of looted goods when a band of highway robbers forces the van off the road. An armed woman named Nina rescues them for the bargain price of 500 rubles. She takes them to an abandoned resort that Dimitri regards as ripe for looting. Nina is squatting there with her father (Volodya) and doesn’t appreciate the concept of being looted in exchange for saving Dimitri’s life. Volodya, on the other hand, wants to make a deal with Dimitri even if he’s a grifter because “We’re Russians. Racketeering’s in our blood. Before, during, and after communism. It courses through our veins as surely as vodka.”

Nina is squatting in the resort because the mine that employed her is being privatized. Dimitri understands (and admires) the investor’s scheme to acquire the mine dirt cheap in exchange for lavish promises of high-paying jobs, followed by closing the mine and selling its assets for a tidy profit. The miners are less sanguine when Dimitri explains the investor’s scheme, but Nina’s boyfriend proposes a grift of his own to benefit the miners.

The story takes the four central characters on an eventful journey through the mountains and villages of a corrupt land. Slava begins to question Dimitri’s cynical nature. Dimitri believes Slava has only acquired morality because he is enchanted by Nina. As a prototypical Russian, Volodya solves problems by drinking and fighting. Nina is attracted to Slava but doesn’t want to betray her boyfriend.

The story is amusing but dark, rooted in the pain of ordinary people who have little hope of improving their lives because they are part of a system that does not value ordinary people. The story creates satisfying tension as the characters clash and unite in pursuit of separate and common agendas. While the ending is satisfying, it doesn’t avoid the harsh reality of life in an empire ruled by crime.

Pierre-Henry Gomont’s art is somewhere between cartoonish and stylized realism. Think Doonesbury with a bit more detail. The story is narrated in the margins between rows of panels. Dialog and thought balloons sometimes rely on a picture — a raging fire or a man swinging from a noose — rather than words. I’m no art critic, but I thought the art made a significant contribution to the story, as should be the case in a graphic novel.

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Beyond the Breach by Ed Brisson (writer) and Damian Couceiro (artist)

Published by Aftershock Comics on May 17, 2022

Beyond the Breach is a graphic novel in five chapters, representing the five issues of the comic book of the same name in which the story first appeared. Ed Brisson tries to add human interest to a humans vs monsters story by giving soap opera lives to the humans. The monsters, on the other hand, have typical monster personalities, in that eating humans seems to be their only interest.

Vanessa’s husband Tristan was shagging her sister while Vanessa was in the hospital watching her mother die. That seems like the beginning of a bad drama, but in just a couple of pages Vanessa, while celebrating her freedom on a road trip, is involved in a multi-car crash instigated by monsters that eat the accident victims. Vanessa is remarkably unscathed. Brave woman that she is, Vanessa saves a kid named Dougie who is trapped in one of the wrecked vehicles before the monsters turn him into lunch. A friendly critter called Kai who resembles a walking bat isn’t much help but at least he’s not trying to eat humans. Kai would be the family dog if dogs could climb trees.

A fellow named Samuel who looks suspiciously like a wizard rides into the story on the back of a giant turtle. Samuel doesn’t know anything about California. Vanessa doesn’t know why a collision and a plane crash and hungry monsters have not attracted the attention of the authorities. Nor does she understand why the monsters come in various shapes and sizes, when alien invasion movies pretty much stick to a single species.

How did this happen? The vague explanation has something to do with interdimensional portals that seem to stick open when Samuel runs through them, dragging monsters in his wake. The reader is not encouraged to give the plot much thought.

Alien law enforcement is on the trail of Samuel. Is he a good wizardy guy or a bad wizardy guy? It seems he’s some of both. Vanessa explores Samuel’s character as they take a road trip to Ohio on the turtle's back. Vanessa wants to help out Dougie, who is now an orphan, but taking a turtle ride to Ohio in the midst of a monster invasion doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Vanessa is a bit of a twit. Vanessa hated her life before she met Samuel and hates it even more after monsters show up, but she proves herself to be plucky and a good friend to children and wizards and little bat creatures and giant turtles. None of that makes her particularly likeable, but at least she doesn’t have the double-D boobs that comic artists seem to admire so much.

Is Beyond the Breach worth reading? It’s about average for science fiction graphic novels that place a heavy emphasis on monsters. The art is a fashionable graphic novel style that’s too sketchy for my taste; human faces are optional, although all the bumpy and gooey parts of monsters are rendered with great care.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Blast vol. 1: Dead Weight by Manu Larcenet

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Europe Comics on Oct. 7, 2015

The central character in Blast, Polza Mancini, is a morbidly obese writer who resembles a snowman with a carrot nose. Most of the characters have noses that could pass for vegetables, or fingers, or bird beaks. The art seems to send the message that people are grotesque. Mancini is more grotesque than most. But Blast also makes the point that “the legitimacy of disgust as a reaction to deformity is a universal principle,” a natural law that causes abnormality to be a defining characteristic rather than one part of a complex individual. And how can someone like Mancini not hate himself when it is so natural for others to hate him?

The graphic novel Blast is Mancini’s story, as told to the police during an interrogation. But Mancini tells his story in own way, slowly relating the entire story of his life as the police impatiently wait for him to confess his crime. The key event, as Mancini tells it, is his exposure to the blast. He felt the blast at a low point in his life. In fact, the story of his life until that point is in black and white (mostly black, representing a dark life), but with his description of the blast, color appears. It is a transcendent, transformative experience. Then it ends, and the world is dark again. Dark and spooky, with massive blotches of black and trembling shapes in gray.

Mancini has a history of entering and leaving psychiatric hospitals, but in a story like this, the reader is asked to decide whether his perspective of life is any less valid than any other. Mancini maintains that society has no problem with individual decisions to alter bodies, sometimes painfully, with surgery and tattoos and piercings, but when people decide to change spiritually “through delicious intoxication,” they are seen as contemptible and unbalanced. A police officer say that Mancini is giving himself “poetic excuses” for being an irresponsible and destructive drunk.

Mancini has (he tells the cops) experienced life, lived without boundaries. He abandoned his wife and his job as a food editor to live the life of a bum, not necessarily choosing to be a bum, but choosing solitude.

Yet solitude is not so easy to find. In the woods, he encounters a group who live apart from society, a self-proclaimed Republic that wants him to join their community. That isn’t the life for Mancini. Yet it is in the woods, joined by a member of the Republic who appears whenever Mancini opens a bottle, that Mancini experiences a second, colorful blast. He perceives all; his awareness is complete. “I heard the inaudible, saw the invisible. There was nothing left to hold me down.” And so he begins to float.

At one point, Mancini muses that silence, like solitude, is a poetic invention. Living in nature is both terrifying and comforting. “There’s a mystery in nature … something you can’t force. It’s revealed only if you know how to wait, perfectly still, and it cannot be shared.” A good many panels are silent, in the sense that they are wordless, but they carry the story along as Mancini travels, observing the world in all its detail — the stray dog lifting its leg, the crumbling wall, the beetles on the forest floor.

When the police provide more facts about Mancini’s past, the reader is challenged to decide whether the police are correct in their view of Mancini, or whether there is any truth in Mancini’s perspective. Has he adopted a self-serving philosophy to avoid remorse or has he discovered a way to live with himself, a philosophy that might benefit others? Blast leaves it to the reader to decide, but since this is the first of four lengthy volumes, there is much more to this original and inventive graphic story. Fans of graphic storytelling, of philosophy, and of the macabre will all find something to admire in Blast.

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Long Road to Liquor City by Macon Blair (Joe Flood, illus.)

Published by Oni Press on February 19, 2019

Liquor City is a legend, a place of which hobos can only dream. Until, that is, a legendary hobo bequeaths a map to Jed and Nathaniel. They follow the map as best they can, although they aren’t much for map reading. And while even other hobos tell him there’s no such place as Liquor City, Jed has faith. Without faith, Jed says, he has nothing. On the other hand, a woman tells Nathaniel that where you’re heading might not be as important as where you are. The differences between those two points of view drive the amusing but surprisingly serious story told in this graphic novel.

Jed and Nathaniel take an American journey, the kind of journey Mark Twain might have imagined, populated by fools and the scoundrels who fool them. Chased by a railroad guard who holds them responsible for his wife’s death, the hobos make their way to a tent revival and then to a hobo jungle where transgressions are punished by fighting a rooster to the death. (The king of the hobo jungle is thinking of franchising.) They search the swamp for a woman who knows ancient secrets (map reading perhaps being among them) and encounter a human trafficker of circus freaks.

The story is fanciful but entertaining. Nathaniel might prefer a less dangerous journey to New York (he has heard tales of hot dogs on every corner in this magical land) but Jed has been there and the residents are too strange for him — unlike the hobos and circus freaks with whom he travels.

Long Road to Liquor City blends action and laughs, all suitably rendered in an artistic style that straddles the line between cartoonish and noir-inspired realism. While the story features a variety of offbeat characters, it finds its heart in Jed and Nathaniel. The journey tests both their endurance and their bond of friendship. Whether Jed and Nathaniel will overcome their philosophical differences is the question that readers will ponder between chuckles.

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