I wish I read more bandes dessinées and had a greater sense of the landscape of this massive continent of the comics globe beyond the classics (Tintin, Asterix, Donjon, Satrapi, David B., etc.). This was my first encounter with young(er than me) artist-author Stéphane Fert, and I was thoroughly charmed. It’s my favourite sort of fantasy experience - an opening salvo that offers glimpses of layered world-building I can’t completely comprehend at this point. The action opens with a foggy landscape, clouds, streams, and trees weaving in and out of each other’s boundaries. A fairy tale landscape. It wasn’t until a second reading that I found the wreck of a modern van in the forest, a gothic trunk reaching up through its windshield like an accusing finger. A medieval mob is pursuing a woman and a swaddled baby. Violence ensues, and when she finally collapses beyond their reach, she’s surrounded by a coven of witches, wearing Halloween hats and smoking like Nouvelle Vague sirens, who debate what the baby is, and what manner of death it deserves. “It’s a girl,” the fleeing woman tells the witches, “She’s just a girl.”

When I say there are layers here, I mean there are interlocking populations who loathe each other: the witches’ coven and their ogress (surprise!) adoptee trying to fight back a demonic mist using only the repellent power of squash vines, the often monstrous local villagers who collaborate with the mist, the country folk who travel to get the witches’ aid for things like unwanted pregnancies, and the Gorges - a vast wasteland of broken skyscrapers where the mist holds sway. I eat the promise of these glimpses up.

But the layers are also visual, and this is what has haunted me about Fert’s work - its strikingly moody watercolour style, shifting its colour palette slowly from scene to scene, sometimes evoking the art deco grandeur of period National Parks posters, sometimes expressionistic horror, sometimes psychedelic swirls, sometimes the glimmering light of Impressionism. Fert is a confident manipulator of pace and place, allowing us to sink slowly into the mood of this otherworld that seems to have sprung, mushroomlike, in the remains of our own.

(I received this book as an ARC via NetGalley. The English-language release of volume 1 of this series - “The Breath of Things” - occurred on September 27, 2023.)