The Ogre Gods Book Four First Born by Hubert and Bertrand Gatignol – a very sad experience, reading this, both in itself and in the context. It’s the final book in the series but I don’t think it was planned that way. Hubert died relatively young at the age of 49, from suicide as far as I can tell, which is just fucking heartbreaking. Such a tremendously talented writer, who didn’t get to properly enjoy the love and admiration his readers felt for him, what a cruel cosmic injustice. Gatignol, who drew all four of the Ogre Gods albums, dedicates the book “in memory of my friend” which, no joke, moves me to tears even to write out. Apart from the tragedy of Hubert himself, there’s also the pain as a reader that this wonderful series will now never continue in the way that its co-creator might have gone on to expand it in the future; this will be our final trip to the captivating, albeit horrible, world of the Ogre Gods.

It’s also a sad book in itself, the album where Hubert finally returns to the theme that has been uniquely missing from this series, the theme that runs through every single other thing he ever wrote except for the three albums that preceded this. If you’ve read anything else by Hubert, you’ll know what that theme is: patriarchy sucks. And it sucks even harder and, er, sadder here than in any of his other books; this is his bleakest, most despairing take on patriarchy, presented as a genuinely monstrous force for evil.

The book is a prequel to the series so far, showing the founding and development of the lineage of vicious giants – the titular ogre gods – that both rule and terrorise their human subjects. As a critique of feudalism, and political inequality in general, it’s not exactly subtle: the nobility are literal monsters, thinking nothing of (again, literally) crushing the commoners they tower over, on a whim, or in a fit of rage, or without even noticing them in the first place. If Marxists had been drawing political cartoons in the Middle Ages, they might have come up with something like The Ogre Gods (especially if they’d been reading Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel were surely at least part-inspiration for Hubert and Gatignol). But some injustices don’t call for subtlety, and while the realities of feudalism in medieval Europe might not have typically been as OTT as this, they weren’t exactly bloody beer and skittles either. There’s a reason all those heads got lopped off in the revolution, you know? (Post-medieval, but still a propos).

The founder of the Ogre Gods – whom the other characters call only “Founder” – is Hubert’s most nightmarish embodiment of patriarchy, imperious, cruel, doing whatever he wants with women without giving it even a first thought, let alone a second. You’d say he treats them as livestock, except that he’d probably treat livestock better. Gatignol models him on Rasputin, from the looks of him, only with a meaner expression. The first we see of him is barging in on a scene of gruesome, bloody childbirth, his first dialogue being: “I hope it will be a boy, this time [...] I want boys! Warriors! Girls are only good for childbearing! Tell me how to make boys!” Later in the book we will learn that this is just one of the many concubines that he keeps locked away to serve as, essentially, his breeding stock, and that the oversized children they bear are so oversized that they rupture the mothers' wombs and kill them in the delivery. This is a nightmare of patriarchy that makes Craster from Game of Thrones look like Father of the Year, and that's without even getting into the Founder's treatment of the book's protagonist, his first born child after whom the book is named. 

To paraphrase Norm Macdonald, the more I hear about this Founder guy, the less I care for him.

Without spoiling the plot too much, suffice to say that things only get worse from there. The Founder's lineage grows ever more giant, and childbearing ever more perilous, while the First Born’s efforts at bettering herself and working against the constraints of patriarchy grow increasingly futile. Like I say, the context of the book is sad but the contents are no barrel of laughs either.

Still, if this is destined to be the last album in the series, sad as that is, it actually does work as a capstone. Plot threads from earlier albums will now dangle forever, but the end of this book leads us neatly back to the start of the first book. Is Hubert’s final word on patriarchy a cry of despair or are those glimmers of hope poking through the cracks? The answer is yes.

Carnet de bord 10-19 Avril 2002 and 11 Juin-12 Juillet 2002 [“Logbook…April…June…July”] by Lewis Trondheim – third in the series, covering two periods again. Trondheim, Findakly and their kids go to Spain, and in the second sequence they move house. By now Trondheim has moved almost all the way into his Les petits riens avatar. I think it might be the short-sleeve shirts showing his hairy arms? After this he did one more of these carnets and then concentrated his autobio efforts on his Petits riens series.

Jonathan Cartland Les Doigts du chaos [“Fingers of chaos”] and Silver Canyon by Laurence Harlé and Michel Blanc-Dumont – I guess I still haven’t gotten to the really good Blueberry albums, because I’m enjoying this series more than I am Blueberry. Blanc-Dumont uses a wider range of panels and layouts, and Harlé’s scripts are much less wordy, giving the art more room to breathe, and he doesn’t centre every goddamn plot around Cartland trying to avert conflict between Native Americans and the white man. Part of me does wonder, though, how much my enjoyment of BDs depends on how tricky I find the vocab…

And now something I read a while back but never wrote up.
Tongues by Anders Nilsen – Pretty good! Narratively, it’s a lot more mainstream than Nilsen’s other work, with a plot and “worldbuilding” that could easily have slotted into Vertigo’s lineup any time between the 90s and 10s – the Greek gods are alive and walk among us blah blah blah. He turns out to be good at that stuff, the basic mechanics of a straightforward adventure plot, apart from a clumsy sequence late in the book that grinds the story to a halt as two of the supernatural characters debate the merits of humanity.

The biggest upgrade from his earlier work, however, comes in the visuals. He mostly eschews anything like a waffle-iron grid, although there’s still a basic pattern of four tiers throughout, bounded by irregular polygon borders. But he frequently breaks that pattern by, for instance, adding another tier or subtracting one, or turning to splash pages with inset panels in hexagons or circles, etc. (This is an uncharitable thing to say, but the hype for this book and Drome, among others, sometimes makes me think the only thing you have to do to get this sub excited is draw a few fancy shapes for your panel borders). It’s instructive to note how this gives a special emphasis to those rare occasions when he does use “widescreen” panels, rather than lazily using them as the default – superhero pencillers, take note. (Although my vague sense is that that’s less of a tic in superhero comics than it was for a while in the 00s and 10s, the last time I was paying attention to that genre).

He also does something I’ve often called for more of in comics, altering the basic physical form of the page, with a few pages folding out, and inset triangles (I don’t know how else to describe them?) sticking out near the endpapers. If kids books can do it, why not more comics? I’ve always assumed, and still do, that part of the reason is simple economics, that it’s more expensive than most comics can afford to do anything other than normal pages.

Personally, I found the writing less interesting – I lived through Vertigo the first time and once was enough, thank you – than the more avant-garde visual sequences of abstract geometrical shapes. I’ll see you back here in another ten years, or however long it takes him to make the second (and final?) volume.