European Graphic Novels+

Following on from Jung's caricatures, here's a look at some of his 'newspaper-style' comics. And just for fun, I tried testing how Google's image translation services were working these days...

For those unaware, "Scooby Doo" refers to the titular, cowardly Great Dane character starring in a bunch of animated Hanna-Barbera cartoons and later media. The riff here is that Mac the basset hound isn't nearly as thrilled about the whole bribery situation as Scooby.

As for the translation services, it seems like they're just about the same as last time around. It would certainly be nice if they could format the text better, in future...

Some of the humor in these is a little culturally elusive to me, as above, but what I love regardless is the masterful storytelling style, and especially the hilarious portraits and expressions that Jung is so great at pulling off...

What greatly helped me understand the above was learning that John the Baptist was said to have eaten a diet heavy on grasshoppers and honey (Matthew 3:4). His mother really should have seen this one coming, haha.

Hmm... I think I'll add Étienne's blog to our webcomics' list. It's somewhat outdated, but does contain ~11yrs of content, including something like 700 content posts(!)
https://etiennejung.blogspot.com/

EDIT: Just quick-posting this for now in case of any possible goof-up. For desktop users, I'll convert the images above in to hotlinks, shortly.

]

Just a super-great artist-writer-creator, that's Italy's Giardino... whew laddie! 😅

All kinds of things going on here... <3

]

https://www.bedetheque.com/auteur-972-BD-Giardino-Vittorio.html

It's one of LEO und friends' shorter series, clocking in at two cycles and 7 books total. The basic premise involves a post-apoc civilisation, one in which white people interestingly find themselves in the minority, with darker-skinned people running the show for the most part.

https://www.bedetheque.com/media/Planches/PlancheS_35328.jpg

Police inspector Romane, one of our two leads, is a skinny white gal, not taken very seriously by her colleagues, yet she's got a great nose for sniffing out inconvenient facts. She's assigned work with Ibrahim, a Middle-Eastern colonel in the UN Forces. Later, they and their little team go up against almost impossible odds against a giant, multinational corporation whose aim in this case is the conduct of genetic experiments designed to produce human-cetacean hybrids, specifically in order to better take advantage of Earth's rising sea levels.

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-35328-BD-Mermaid-Project.html

In fact I'm re-reading cycle two right now, called Mutations, in which Romane & her now-boyfriend 'Brahim' have predictably been screwed over by governmental-corporate interests as the two-book series opens, stripped of their jobs and titles until the ~~morons~~ er, powers that be gain a clue, and bring them back on board to address a new threat... one in which an outside agency is using weapons and mind-control to attack the various fishing vessels largely sustaining what's left of humanity.

Er, I'll be honest... the whole reason for this post originated from the fact that I found the doggos' facial expressions in panel 1 so dang amusing, as compared to the overall gravity of the situation. XD

Seriously, though-- this is quite a solid series, containing lots of thought-provoking fare. Biggest nitpick is that it didn't quite have the stupendous windup in tome 7 that I was emotionally hoping for, but... life's like that, sometimes, mais non?

Just to be clear-- if you're not interested in issues such as sustainability, animal rights, the defeat of fascism and so forth, this series might just be a 'dud' for you.

Requested The Collected Toppi: Vol.1 The Enchanted World from my library's interloan service, and the library that responded gave me Vol 1-3! Three library loans for the price of one, haha.

I dig Toppi's linework. He's a very technical artist, and the work is very detailed and intricate. I'm also a sucker for black and white comics, which is mostly why I requested him after seeing a few people recommend him online for b&W bandee dessinee. The stories from Vol. 1 are all dark fairy tales basically, they're quite short and simple in the storytelling, not a lot of dialogue or plot. But damn, are they atmospheric.

If you have a local library, you should definitely check if they have an inter-library loan service. The majority of comics I have requested, they've been able to find. I also got The Collected Crepax Vol.1 from them as well, which I'll post when I get the chance.

Been in a B&W type of mood, if you guys have any more recommendations, let me know ;)

edit: Also, noticed that lemm.ee scaled the image, so here's a link to the larger original in all it's glory: https://ibb.co/prxDH8Hs

It's professor Calculus' space ship from Destination Moon of course, from the Tintin series.

The rocket is so iconic of Tintin that I find it easily over-represented at times, but this one stopped me in my tracks, as I'd never seen a photo-realistic attempt before; especially a night-view. Just a slight bit of upscaling added, and Robert's your avuncular figure.*

* (Bob's your uncle)

Day view.

I thought this all might be AI at first, but thankfully, I'm not acting the goat this time.

In fact it's professional animator Erik Wernquist's work, with more here:
https://erikwernquist.com/work

And one more boffo piece I stumbled upon... I believe this one by someone named Anton Hebert Baron.

To zoom-in on desktop, right-click open:

Gina Lollobrigida, from Fanfan la tulipe (1952)

Leslie Nielsen, perhaps from around the late 50's

Norma Shearer, Canadian-American
actress and feminist pioneer

John Wayne, Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland,
from Reap the Wild Wind (1942)

Harold Peckridge (1906-1989)
(no idea who that is, but I'm thinking he'd be a lovely fit
as one of the professors from Tintin's Shooting Star)

Marlon Brando, presumably from
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Claudia Cardinale

"Blanche Neige fêtera ses 80 printemps cette année"
I think that says "Snow White is ~~80~~ 88 springs old this year"

More coming...
https://www.bedetheque.com/auteur-6045-BD-Jung-Etienne.html

I can't remember if this fits in to the classic Den series, but my digital library has it, so I'll be giving it a whirl, soon. In any case, TCJ (The Comics Journal) has a solid article on this book(s), including more sample art, like this one:

And the rest:
https://www.tcj.com/reviews/murky-world/

Corben of course was an honorary member of the 'Euro art club.' Moebius for example was gaga about his work. My Denz part III intro is still alive on Imgur, for those curious:

https://lemm.ee/post/11235458

How I adore this series, by Pénélope Bagieu:
https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-18832-BD-Josephine-Bagieu.html

It's such a catty take-down of all our little interpersonal, social tricks, with Josephine being my absolute heroine (and center of the hurricane) upon this madness. Anyway, here's slide two:

Now me, I barely watched "Desperate Housewives," but could this be kinda-sort of the like?

This of course is a Euro adaptation of one of the great Conan tales, here reconstructed by Régis Hautière & Didier Cassegrain, and indeed, part of an excellent series:

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-60536-BD-Conan-le-Cimmerien.html

In Red Nails, Conan and Valeria happen to bump in to each other whilst fleeing a dinosaur-predator. They're not exactly fond of each other due to past history, but they're forced to form a truce, so as to escape... well, being dinner.

Unfortunately, the only real place to flee is an abandoned... castle, or palace... weirdly without windows, or any sort of 'usual' architecture.

It gets much, much crazier from here, and is absolutely worth a read, via this particular BD, or via [the source].

Red Nails was Howard's last Conan tale, before tragedy cut short his life at only 29yo. Like most of his Conan (and other) work, it's very dark-pulpish, aspects of which the various comic adaptations only occasionally capture, IME.

Once again, I'm still lingering on Cape Horn, this time on book two:

In the meantime, I'm still grappling hard to understand the relevant context and history of this particular region (Tierra del Fuego, set in the late 1800's), as well as the various individuals the 4-tome series tracks in this chaotic, frontier environment. Anyway, let's start with something pleasant:

It's a young French officer serving with one of the local small navies (Chilean or Argentinian, I can't remember) writing to his sweetheart. The words to me are almost secondary to the way the panels are pleasantly, skillfully laid out:

As a chronic fan of 'show me, don't tell,' I really like the way these panels communicate his sweetie's letter sparsely, mixed with getting a sense of the local flavor.

Ruh-roh, but now enters the sinister Kruger (see the map diagram last post for more on how he absconded with his buddies' gold), who we now learn has even more of a darker backstory.

Poor Ernesto...

I can tell you, however, that Kruger will eventually pay for this humilation.

You see... that 'she' was in fact Ernesto's wife, who he'd previously reformed and pledged his devotion to. Yikes.

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-12686-BD-Cap-Horn.html

This is so clever and impressive to me, even if it's a bit scholarly in form, I suppose. It's from the opening pages of In the Cormorants' Wake, T2 from Cape Horn. The point is that you can completely miss T1, yet still get everything you need to make the backstory work in T2.

It's just brill, at least for the likes of me, anyway.

Btw, I added some colors to help make the notes clearer, themed to Roy G. Biv, a tremendous son-of-a-gun if there ever was one. :P

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-12686-BD-Cap-Horn.html

I.e., seemingly another fruitful Franco-Italian combination upon BD. ^^

In any case, I'm just getting in to this series, so let's see what happens...

Now, I haven't read this one recently, but hopefully you'll allow me the brazen chutzpah to share some thoughts and pics, right here. (I mean, it was already on my list, and I just figured-- let's get to it, matey)

Anyway, for me, Gemma Bovery was hugely significant to me around 2yrs ago, when it re-lit my fire to learn français, once and for all. Since then, by hook or by crook, I've genuinely worked much harder both via the DuoLingo app, as well as across my attempts to read French BD in general, getting me to about the mid-A2 level now in French, perhaps? (oof, it's a process, anyway)

Okay, what I find immediately, *highly* unique here is the way in which this BD combines both text and illustrative passages. I mean... sure, you can see this across many (or most?) children's books, but these days? It's more like... 'coucou, not how we do things in comics et BD!' XD

And of course, as English-speakers, we get these little bits of easy French words and phrases to discover across these comics. Not sure about you, matey, but it just really WORKS over here, I think, perhaps, maybe.

Without diving too absurdly deeply, there's a love-triangle working here, or quadrangle, or maybe just a bunch of unfortunates converging upon devastating topic of choice? :S

But the main thing, really? It's all about Joubert's (the baker) fascination with Gemma suffering across a bad marriage, her terrible taste in men, and just rotten, lousy work, at the end of days.

Now me-- I'm used to judging these works (heaven help my idiot opinion), upon a gathering of things, let's say, but this is one of those that, to me, examines some rather deep workings of a woman's soul, as seen from an immediate distance.

Of course, it's just my pure flight of fancy that artist Dongni Hau was specifically imagining Joan here, but the ages (and maybe armor style?) seem to roughly fit, in which Joan would have been between 17-19yo, around 1429-1431AD.

One of the most fascinating things I've seen across the arts is the way in which vastly-different cultures examine each other (and produce imitative work) across such vast, geographical & social gulfs. As in-- no matter how culturally-conservative and predictable such a process might go, there is STILL almost always something fascinating in the interpretation and recapitulation, I personally find.

Now me, I don't really know what to make of the heavily religious-political overtones during Joan's (or almost any other) era, but in terms of pure narrative (based on historical fact, mind you), I find Joan's sadly brief life & times rather fascinating, tragic, and certainly moving.

The artist's site is below.
She's from Fuxin, Liaoning, China, and now lives and paints in Paris:
https://dongnihou.com/

I've always enjoyed the visceral, impactful red-black or red, black & white color theme. Unfortunately, it's not something I explored very much during my 'watercolors & acrylics' peak of creativity. Hence, why I admire (and envy, dammit) other artists who had success with that theme, as seen above. Still... regardless of the particular color-theme, I find the backdrop art quite superb on its own.

Also kind of amusing in a sense, since the original Italian poetry here seems heavily butchered in translation, not exactly helping one's enjoyment of the pure artistry.

I mean, lol... it's either "haha" or bah," at such point? 😵

Eh, in any case, I'm thinking these panels depict the opening to a play, in which a narrator both describes a backstory, as well as foretells things to come, like 'Willy Shaketown'-style?

Very sadly, Rome's Tenuta passed away at only 54yo, in 2023.
He sounded like a perfectly swell bloke:
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/t/tenuta_saverio.htm
https://downthetubes.net/in-memoriam-comic-artist-saverio-tenuta/

If you feel like playing today's game, then take a moment to come up with your best answers, and then compare them to the answers below:
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HINTS: (please don't look if you don't need them)
If you need a hint upon #3, then I'll offer two, but you must deduct 2pts from your overall score for reading each one. I'll go ahead and write the hints upside-down just below for those who don't want it.

˙ɹǝᴉsɐǝ ɥɔnɯ sᴉ Ɛ# uǝɥʇ 'ᄅ# ʇno ǝɹnƃᴉɟ uɐɔ noʎ ɟI (Ɩ

¿uoᴉƃǝɹ-puɐlsᴉ ʇɐɥʇ ɟo ʎʇᴉɔ uᴉɐɯ ǝɥʇ sᴉ ʇɐɥM (ᄅ

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ANSWERS:

1. It's professor Pacôme de Champignac, Fantasio, Spirou, and Panoramix ("Getafix" in English translations) EDIT: Oh! I deserve a rap on the knuckles for omitting Spip the squirrel, and Idéfix ("Dogmatix"), The scoring has been adjusted.

2. Astérix en Corse ("Asterix in Corsica"), the 20th Asterix album

"Corsica" is the best-selling title in the history of the series, owing to its sales in the French-speaking market, but is one of the least-selling titles in the English language. --WP

3. The poster is from the annual comics festival in Ajaaccio, Corsica, an event I just learned about myself! Specifically, this is evidently a piece made by Fabrice Tarrin for the event, which... looks like it was maybe from the 19th show, from 2022?

SCORING:

1. Give yourself 1pt for each character you correctly identified.
2. Give yourself 3pts for identifying the correct tome.
3. Give yourself another 4pts for identifying the -specific- city of the event. (let's give back a near-miss Corsican city 1pt in return, though)

HINTS:
As stated above, deduct two points for each hint taken earlier.

Max score is ~~11pts~~ 13pts. How did you do?

Btw, this here festival looks PRETTY GREAT!
And look, mateys-- it's coming up again in November...
https://festivalbdajaccio.corsica/

BACKSTORY: I recently had the privilege of reading US publisher Dark Horse's ~250pp collected translation of the 'Rocco' adventures. Previously, I'd only seen some of Torres' art panels, which I shared here about a year+ ago. Naturally, Imgur bumbled them all away, so don't bother searching. :-/

Right, then-- the first thing that hit my eyes about this series was the delicious, traditional LC art, fairly similar to Henk Kuijpers tremendously clean, detailed work on the wonderful Franka series. But in this case, when it came to the individual figures and faces, they could almost be described as circus-like, or even zoo-like, perhaps a bit of a mashup betwixt Otto Soglow's The Little King and a soupçon ("soups on, boys!") of Serge Clerc's interesting line-work, grotesquely-amusing as it could sometimes be.

Now, Daniel Torres evidently created these stories mainly during the 80's, I think? In this series, he seems to be imagining a parallel reality in which many of the planets and moons of our Solar system have long-been settled by that time, and by that point, they're perfectly abundant with their own politics, tensions, intrigue, and infighting. Yeap, same as it ever were.

More specifically though, we follow the title character, who at this point is utterly burned out from his earlier 'fast-lane life,' and really just wants to settle down and run his pleasant country club, of sorts. Naturally, a parade of both total strangers and people from his past keep intruding on his retirement-life, forcing him to get involved again and again, a traditionally fruitful premise IMO.

FINAL THOUGHTS?
I can easily recommend this one from a style-perspective alone. Frequently, it's simply fascinating to look at, no matter how the story is going. That said, there's a certain busyness and chaos to the stories that I feel like Yves Chaland's artistry captures better, via his Freddy Lombard stories. Then again, the Rocco stories have a totally 'pulpy-noir' feel, if you can overcome the 'noir' aspect being oversaturated by certain googie/jet-set/retro-futuristic stylings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ducreux

So, he was a multi-talented artist who worked under the 'fat boy'* and somehow managed to survive the bloody French Revolution, alongside his colleague David.

* one of Louis XVI's most notorious nicknames

My understanding is that he was meticulously-trained as an artist, and generally-speaking, did thoroughly professional work... until he had his personal time, in which he decided to 'boogie on down with his bad self,' as we once used to say in the States. I think. XD

But wait, there's more! I understand that some of his pics recently turned in to a sort of cottage-industry of memes. Behold:

EDIT: Alright, alright, here's a couple of those decoded. Most are rap-themed, I think?

#2 They see me rollin', they hatin' (Ridin song reference)
#7 STOP, it's hammer-time (MC Hammer song ref)

I first saw this question posted at a Tintin community a couple weeks ago, so here's my take on the matter. To be clear, these represent my best 'hangover-cures' for Tintin readers craving more, roughly-ranked from most immediately-relevant, all the way down...

NOTE: in terms of the obvious title-drops, please just google them. More specific stuff I'll link you to directly. Also note: Georges Remi and "Hergé" are the same person. Alright, here we go!

• Alph-Art, the final, half-finished album, if you haven't already.
• Lake of Sharks if you absolutely must, but it's not by Hergé.
• Ampton's heavenly review series of the albums, breaking them down and providing loads of context and insights.
• The various fan-made Tintin pastiches, if you don't mind that they can get pretty wild and ridiculous (some are French-only). EDIT: link updated.

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Many (or most?) of them even got collected in to two
books, by NZ art historian John Stringer, seen above.

• Then there are the earlier versions of the stories from the original publishers, Le Petit Vingtieme, Le Soir, and finally Le Journal de Tintin, i.e. "Tintin Magazine." So to be clear-- after the full stories ran their course in such works, they were later collected in to album format by book-publishers, and still later, republished with significantly improved art and some editing, here and there. What's especially cool about the early stuff is that one can plainly see the artistry and storytelling of Tintin improving bit-by-bit, not to mention see some scenes which *didn't* make it in to the albums. [N.B. you can find many of these magazines and earlier-format albums at places like Archive.Org, or the same kinds of sites where one can D/L college texts]

Le Petit Vingtieme, a newspaper extra
in which Tintin ran from 1929–1940.

Le Soir, published in the eye of the hurricane, i.e. during the occupation, 1940-1944. (eh, I'm just going to go with a pleasant "Sophia" look for this later edition, as this period wound up taking years off Hergé's life and well-being)

Tintin magazine, in which the character appeared from 1946-1976, with the journal finally ceasing production in 1993, ten years after Hergé's death. (finally, G-Remi had complete control over his own character's publication, and in terms of these covers, there's plenty of silly stuff like the above, plus many other series depicted that appeared in the mag)

• Of course, check out ANY of the many fine books digging in to the backstory and making of the series, as well as the Georges Remi biographies. For example, one can get a fascinating sense of how hard Hergé worked behind the scenes to consistently publish a comic with high credibility and integrity, eventually and directly leading to a nervous breakdown or two, along the way. 😔
• Hergé's Totor, an early template, and direct predecessor to the Tintin character.
• Jo, Zette & Jocko, a Tintin-like, 5-tome series, designed explicitly for children, altho personally I liked it a lot, speaking as a 'supposed-adult.'
• Quick and Flupke, Hergé's fascinating attempt to compete with popular newspaper/magazine strips of the day, altho I'm not sure it stands up to the test of time, very well.
• Garen Ewing's wonderful, superb Rainbow Orchid series.
• Les McClaine's superb Jonny Crossbones (FREE TO READ online).
• Yves Chaland's Freddy Lombard adventures are interesting, since they're in a similar visual format and feature a Tintin-like character, but the style is a lot more arty and mysterious, not to mention "Freddy" and friends are frequently 'punk-ass-bitches,' to express it less than artfully.
• Moving into other media, there's a program of BBC radio adaptations, two TV series, a number of movies & documentaries, seven video games, and more. [LINK]
• Oh, and of course the fake Tintin covers are huge fun! Here's an archive of 1000+ of them.

Oof, I was trying to go to Youtube to pull out one of my favorite phrases of all time such as to wrap things up, i.e. "Well, there it is!" (from Emperor Joseph in Amadeus, 1984)

Somehow, in search of that, I bumbled upon a different, beloved scene, and... oh dear, haha, I'm just gonna leave it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKPDfB40t48

UPDATE:
In the interest of fact-checking, I decided to consult with u/jm-9, upon my various reccos, someone who I (and quite-likely many others) consider a particularly fine Remi and Tintin scholar. Very graciously on JM's part, they provided some fascinating, thoughtful feedback that stacked upon what I'd written, but also specifically corrected certain of my errors, plus a certain naiveté upon my Tintin history.

Hummm... and yet, after some reflection upon how to best integrate our notes & opinions in to a combined, rigorously-fact-checked whole, I'm settling upon it simply being wiser to simply add-on jm-9's notes after mine:

Great post! It's accurate for the most part. I know that Tintin appeared in Tintin magazine until the 80s through reprints and a colourisation of The Blue Lotus (similar to the recent publication). Of course, this is only a minor detail as the last new story to be published was indeed Tintin and the Picaros in 1976. The only other thing, though also a really small detail, is that Le Soir Jeunesse isn't mentioned. The majority of The Crab with the Golden Claws was published in this children's supplement of Le Soir before it ended due to wartime paper shortages.

As to additions, here are a few that I thought of:

You could mention Tintin and the Golden Fleece and Tintin and the Blue Oranges. These are movies but book versions were published by Methuen in the 60s. Of course, they haven't been reprinted since, and aren't in comic format either, so if this is targeted at English speakers it mightn't be that relevant given the difficulty of acquiring them.

When discussing the older versions, it would be a good idea to mention that they often have extra content. Feel free to reference this post of mine if you wish, though the formatting seems to have disappeared with the new Reddit site:

**https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAdventuresofTintin/comments/clz69e/deleted_scenes_from_colour_tintin_albums/ **

If you're targeting French speakers, Hergé: Le Feuilleton Intégral is a really good resource for the serialised versions including cover art of Le Petit Vingtième, Le Soir Jeunesse and Tintin magazine. It is unfortunately incomplete though.

For Quick and Flupke, you could mention the four books that are somewhat available in English. They are Fasten Your Seatbelts, Under Full Sail, Double Trouble and Two of a Kind. The others are unfortunately quite rare in English.

For Tintin and Alph-art, you could mention that the original 1990 album has full size drawings instead of much smaller ones, and is much easier to see details in. That version is much more expensive in English though, as the curent edition has rediscovered pages that the 1990 version lacks.

Thanks so much for creating this post by the way! It's a really good resource for Tintin fans.

I thought this was a neat, sepia-like piece, what with it's effective pen-like line shading, and a quasi-fairytale interaction of light and shadow. Could be a wimmelbilder, I reckon.

It comes from a book I've just started, Ye, in which Brasilian talent Petreca seems to handle almost every aspect of the book's creation.

---> a high-detail version of the art is here, as long as Imgur can manage to hang on to it <---

About the book, I can't give any sort of review yet, but here's what BDT had to say:

One of his generation's most talented comic book writers, Guilherme Petreca offers us "Ye", a cauldron of references to the inner-workings of his own mind. It tells the story of a young mute who goes in search of healing.

This fantastic, poetical work shows us Ye's learning journey, set during his transition from adolescence to adulthood. We encounter pirates and monsters, a retiring accordionist, and even a drunken clown*, all in a world full of nightmarish dangers and misadventures. But all this will eventually lead him to Miranda, an old healing witch with 'a thousand eyes.'

* (N.B.-- not a JohnnyEnzyme reference in this case)

[more pics]

EDIT: To be clear-- I think there's a good chance this is from the superb Angel Wings series, by Yann and Hugault. I'd say: RUN, DON'T WALK, if there's a chance of you getting hold of that series!

Details on the plane itself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_J2F_Duck

I was seemingly out of the loop in Druillet's heyday, not really being aware of Heavy Metal magazine until the early 90's, I guess it was. Unfortunately, by that time I don't think 'HM' was publishing much of Druillet's stuff, anymore.

NOTE: just in case it's not known, Mssr Philippe was one of the four founders of Les Humanoïdes Associés, which were a huge advancement in getting BD / Euro-comics published across the world, including the States.

Anyway... for me, this amazing magazine cover is a typically wild, hilarious, and even somewhat nightmarish work that this living-legend produced. (yes, he's 80yo now)

I understand that it comes from a retrospective by "Mel" publishers, back in 2017. Anybody read that edition..?

Here's a Franco-Italian collaboration about an English pilot leading an historical Dutch expedition across the mighty Pacific, towards the Southeast Asian 'lands of silk,' circa 1600. (this was an historical thing, no joke)

Bah, and as happens far too commonly with me, my initial thought was to simply share some nice art, namely the two halves of page 11:

To me, the above is nice, satisfying and competent art in the draftsmanship sense, but what really sent me was the overall sunset gradient, saturation and mood. It's just nawt something I'd seen before in comics, and thus wanted to share.

(like it? don't like it? just meh?)

Anyway, (*oh boy, and here we go again*) then I just had to share a couple more panels in order to help improve the narrative sense, which IS....

Yes... in fact, it's about the real-life historical figure of sailor William Adams, whose preliminary life & times in Japan were captured by a great book by James Clavell (and further, creatively elaborated upon), and later, two great series and a stage play, all united by the title Shōgun. [link]

Oh, and it also has heavy overtones directly upon the great Catholic vs. Protestant rift in Christianity, in which we observe that the mutual antipathy was nawt confined to merely Europe. That these allegedly 'brothers in a Christian God' were perfectly willing to shred each other to bits based on the old yadda-yadda of 'mine is the one true faith,' etc.

In any case, this was a two-book series which mainly focused on a sort of running, philosophical / ideological battle between Adams and his daimyo captor / frenemy Tokugawa Ieyasu (i.e. Lord Toranaga in the books).

Now I wouldn't call it nearly as spellbinding (and incredibly long & epic) as Shōgun itself, but it did capture an interesting, more historically-accurate picture of the situation, in a mere two books of standard BD-length. (about 56pp each)

Oof, and I'd not previously heard of this creative team before, so let me just quote:

Scénario : Mariolle, Mathieu
Dessin : Genzianella, Nicola
Couleurs : Alquier, Fabien
Lettrage : Dewrée, Amaury

https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-55149-BD-William-Adams-Samourai.html

Nice work there, mateys! 😃

THEME MUSIC: While I was working on this post, I enjoyed listening to Azymuth - Cuica Laranja Azeda, which sorta-kinda represents the Portuguese members of the drama.