Po napisach

Z pasją o filmach

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20 ulubionych komiksów 2025 roku - Po napisach - komiks - książka - kino

20 ulubionych komiksów 2025 roku. Ranking komiksów wydanych w 2025 roku. Najlepsze według autora bloga 'Po napisach'.

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It seems to me that Creature from the Black Lagoon is, within the whole Universal gang, more of a second‑tier celebrity. There are, after all, certain (theoretical) limitations to this figure. It operates strictly within its swamp, and in general no one really knows what it wants (blondes tend to have an easier time with it). It’s part nature’s guardian, part menace, a legend not unlike the Loch Ness Monster.

It first appeared on the big screen in Jack Arnold’s 1954 film. It’s a remarkably successful picture on many levels: excellent underwater cinematography, an unforgettable costume designed by Disney animator Milicent Patrick, and inside it a skilled swimmer, Ricou Browning.

I once wrote about Arnold’s film this way:

“Fast‑paced action and plenty of weighty moments piercing through the entertainment‑driven plot. A classic, one of the foundations of the monster‑movie tradition, which filmmakers around the world still draw from when it comes to solutions and ideas.”

Creature from the Black Lagoon has never been exploited as heavily as its monstrous siblings from Universal. Dracula, released in this cycle by Lost in Time, captivated with its imagery but also with its approach to the subject. I wrote about that comic that it was “solid in terms of script, with a strong idea of the vampire as a figure who is present yet always in the shadows, always ready to strike (like a true predator), and with a beautiful approach to epic, bloody horror.” My only complaint was the format — with illustrations that striking, it really could have been larger.

Let’s return to the second episode of Universal Monsters. Here, I won’t complain about the format. Matthew Roberts’s artwork isn’t dazzling in terms of linework, but it fits this album size perfectly. The colors by Dave Stewart and Trish Mulvihill are applied solidly, without rising above the standard. The script, however, is excellent and engaging — it blends the old with the new, legend with emotional thriller. It’s a story I’d love to see on the big screen.

In the album we follow Kate Marsden, who heads to Peru in pursuit of a serial killer. A rotten story from the United States finds its finale at the Black Lagoon. At that Black Lagoon.

In an era when pop culture freely reinterprets the classics while simultaneously undermining its own foundations, Ram V and Dan Watters were given one of cinema’s most archetypal monsters. Instead of recreating the legend, they modernize it and add the genre elements it needs.

The comic grows out of two traditions. The first is, of course, the legacy of the Universal Monsters, where the creature was always a figure of fear and desire, a projection of what humans repress. The second is the contemporary school of storytelling: dense, psychological, built on loops of trauma and on characters who cannot distinguish their inner demons from the external ones.

Interestingly, just like in the earlier Dracula, the monster here is neither antagonist nor hero — it is more of a presence. It appears at the margins of panels, often barely visible. Thematically, the comic is primarily about how trauma distorts perception, reshapes relationships with the world, and drags one into a spiral of obsession. A good story.

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I have a handful of very vivid memories connected to Rork from my teenage years. It was a formative time, and the title itself meant a great deal to me.

When the turn of the decade came—specifically in 1989—I was like Bastian from The NeverEnding Story, except I wasn’t sitting in an old antiquarian bookshop but rather tucked away in my own room. I was reading comics. The following year would bring the TM‑Semic Punishers, but let me remind you that in this little story it’s still 1989, and I’m flipping through an issue of Komiks Fantastyka—that was my first encounter with Rork. I must have walked away from that session transformed, because Rork, or more precisely that reading experience, stayed with me for decades. I probably devoured Rork many times during that crucial period of my reading life. But since then, we hadn’t met again.

A few single images remained in me like tattoos on memory—the levitating Rork, the stain, the great townhouse unfolded like a puzzle, and finally that house built on a cursed spot, on a high seaside cliff, with a torn‑out fragment of wall.

And when I picked up the collected edition now (Book 1), I felt that wonderful sensation of returning images. As if someone had carefully washed and backlit those memory‑tattoos. Yes, everything became sharp again. The white‑haired gentleman in a black coat once more tries to tame mysterious forces, piece reality back together, avoid stumbling in this labyrinth of unsettling events.

Today I look differently at Andreas’s work, at the chain of meanings, at Rork himself, and at the illustrations and their many inspirations. I have the knowledge that came from reading other books, from film screenings, and—speaking colloquially—from life.

Andreas, a creator of German origin working mainly in the Francophone sphere, entered a phase of intense experimentation in the 1980s. You can see in this volume a fascination with the European comics avant‑garde, but also traces of American horror and fantasy storytelling. I felt Lovecraft here, because I sense that unimaginable terror of something powerful behind the wall, in a parallel world, something that can break through just like that, unceremoniously, yet remains suspended in a state of waiting. And Rork can look into those places—now I understand that. He grasps everything, ignores nothing, is often perplexed and, like the reader, has no answers to many questions.

Andreas bends the medium almost impossibly—he tests how far the boundaries of readability can be pushed. He doesn’t worry much about our perception, yet he always succeeds, because horror and mystery (in this form!) defend themselves without exception.

It’s also a demanding album, but a fascinating one, and far ahead of its time. I read and look at it carefully after several decades, and I’m still amazed at how creative Andreas is—not only in his narrative acrobatics but also in the way he stages action. I probably don’t need to mention the quality of the illustrations—he’s a master of the delicate line, and his unmistakable technique remains captivating to this day.

Returning once more to today’s reception and emotions, I feel they are built not through the characters’ expression but through the construction of space. Empty panels, sudden shifts in perspective, recurring architectural motifs—all of this creates a sense of unease. Yes, the word “unease” should appear most often when describing an encounter with this album.

The collected edition includes several stories. We didn’t get the “complete” Rork in the 1990s—Bartek Kurc explains the publishing turmoil in detail. And the additional materials included here are excellent as well—a great introduction by Arkadiusz Królak, a wealth of extra illustrations, and of course Rork’s adventures: “Ghosts,” “Fragments,” “Passages,” “The Cemetery of Cathedrals.”

A remarkable comic.

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Backrooms

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Great cover, pleasant linework by Juan Luis Landa, but the content offered by Jean Dufaux intrigued me only in part.

The landscape of events in the first volume of Ogre is the Hundred Years’ War — a long chain of conflicts between England and France. At this particular historical moment depicted in Ogre, France is in retreat. The English dominate, spread fear, and the alliances that form are extremely fragile, as uncertain as the entire situation on the continent.

This album overwhelmed me with its narrative layer, and I think I’m drifting further and further away from historical comics. The multitude of names, the relationships between characters, the side plots, the mentioned alliances, and the political turbulence knocked me flat. There is simply a lot of it — as a reader, I stopped absorbing the handfuls of facts (some characters are historical, along with dates and places) mixed with fiction.

Of course, the comic grows out of a fascination with an era in which war was a natural state and violence the language of politics. Jean Dufaux, a Belgian comics writer, feels perfectly at home in such constructed works. These historical, more or less epic tales are his specialty — that’s where he thrives. I’ve read his Crusade (with art by Philippe Xavier), and I’ve also read Fox (a title with a stronger adventure tone). The pattern is similar. Here too, in Ogre, the backdrop is anchored in a specific place and time, and historical events flow smoothly into those that are purely fictional.

From this era, from this bombardment of names and surnames, I managed at least to extract the essence — the titular ogre everyone wants to catch. He is surrounded by many ghastly stories, sometimes fabricated (within the comic’s own logic), sometimes true. This thread is genuinely interesting. It ties well with the metaphor he embodies — a figure that becomes an allegory of war, famine, and everything associated with wartime crisis. And into this motif steps Joan — not yet a saint, but already capable of illuminating every darkness with her presence.

The graphic layer speaks its own language. I’m not familiar with Juan Luis Landa’s other works, but the ones in Ogre complement the story well. Landa does not get lost (unlike me) in the flood of information — every character has a distinctive look and can be quickly recognized. Several battle scenes come out really well; it’s worth examining the battlefield more closely there. The illustrator skillfully draws the chaos of combat — piles of bodies, knights in convulsions, clashing soldiers. It’s all solid, though it doesn’t rise above the norm. Hard not to appreciate it, but just as hard to be amazed.

The first volume is something of a historical thriller — that’s where I stumbled. But as a novel about the birth of a myth? In that aspect, I’ll be waiting to see how things unfold.

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“Druuna Vol. 2: The Creature. The Predator” is the album in which Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri stops pretending that his cycle is merely a post‑apocalyptic survival fantasy. In this second collected volume he reveals the true nature of his universe: an extraordinarily capacious science‑fiction horror, with those very genres dominating the album.

Of course, no matter how many conventions we identify here, that bold eroticism pulses through every moment. Serpieri never abandons his greatest obsession—corporeality, which on the artistic level, in the rendering of Druuna, her many companions, bodies tangled in debauched poses, remains unmatched. The illustrative style is the foundation. Serpieri draws with maniacal precision. Every muscle, every fold of skin, every architectural detail matters. And although we leave behind the pure post‑apocalypse fused with sci‑fi (“Druuna Vol. 1: Morbus Gravis. Delta”) and move deeper into hard science fiction, many elements—especially structural ones—remain in place.

Narratively, Serpieri transitions between events in his albums in a rather peculiar way. This time we accompany the crew of a spaceship lured to a specific point in space. It is already Druuna’s world, almost a living organism where fantasies, nightmares, and visions blend, only occasionally solidifying into something more real. The characters’ consciousness—captain included—seems to balance on the border of two orders. The key, of course, is her—Druuna—who, unfortunately and as usual, appears trapped in a constant lethargy, suspended in her unreal existence.

Serpieri remains bold, though he stumbles over the number of meanings he wants to implant in his work. He fuses pulp aesthetics with metaphysics, grotesque with lyricism, corporeality with philosophy. Sometimes he gets away with it; sometimes—when he tries to explain the state of things more clearly—the panels buckle under the weight of the text (though admittedly, it is not difficult to read on a literary level).

At the same time, Serpieri, like a true Italian stepping into the genre field, draws liberally from the classics. His second Druuna volume contains a bit of Alien, but even more of its many imitators, including the underrated—yet in my view very successful—Galaxy of Terror (1981), directed by Bruce D. Clarke.**

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Mocny tytuł, bardzo zwodniczy, a odczytuję go jako wyjątkowo pozytywny. Debiut Natalii Legutko jest tym kalejdoskopowym zapisem całego szeregu wspomnień, przefiltrowanych najczęściej przez dziecięcą (autorki, czyli jej własną) optykę. Ja pozwolę sobie swoje wrażenia przedstawić w nieco rozchwianej formie (jakby kiedyś było inaczej).

Pierwsze uczucie, jakiego doznałem w trakcie lektury, to… ciepło. Tak, z całym tym przypomnieniem wydarzeń z mojego dzieciństwa lub raczej już dorastania (jestem starszy niż Natalia) przyszło ciepło. To dobre uczucie, bezpieczne, przypominające o komforcie tamtych czasów, gdy złe rzeczy (nawet jeżeli istniały) były najczęściej w telewizorze, gdzieś obok. A nawet nie chodzi o złe rzeczy, tylko te wszystkie, które mogłyby zmącić beztroskę - nie martwienie się o śniadanie, obiad, rzeczy do ubrania. Zdaję sobie sprawę, że to przywilej. I Natalia miała dobre dzieciństwo (to wnioski po komiksie), i ja takie miałem. Bywa różnie, każdy mógłby przecież mieć własną historię.

Nostalgia tutaj, jak i na przykład w innym komiksach, choćby w "Sezonie spadających gwiazd", to te przykłady wspomnień, przy których dobre i ciepłe obrazy wypierają dramatyczne niekiedy historie poza kadr. Nie wątpię, że każdy miał smutne chwile, ale beztroska, zapach świąt, rodzinnego domu - to przeważa w naszych powrotach. Szczególnie gdy od tamtych czasów się oddalamy.

I Natalia Legutko tak właśnie działa ze swoim debiutem. Nie będę oceniać, zresztą rzadko to robię. De facto pewną niesprawiedliwością byłoby ten komiks ocenić, bo to przecież jej życie, Natalii. W faktografii wszystko się zgadza - też tu mieszkałem, też jadłem mniej więcej w tym samym czasie pierwszego McDonalda, oglądałem telewizję z dekodera i tak dalej.

Ilustracyjnie to styl ikon i piktogramów, bardzo prosty, ale przecież już Łukasz Wojciechowski w swoim "Dum‑Dum" pokazał mi, że nie realizm świadczy o umiejętności przekazywania odpowiednich nastrojów i emocji. Natalia Legutko tylko to potwierdza. Proste i schematyczne rysunki, z dobrze dobraną kolorystyką, zawsze miłą dla oka, ze wspomnieniami, które są jej - małej bohaterki - ale i nasze, całej reszty rodaków.

Niech będzie! To dobry komiks, kawał zapisu ważnych czasów - i nie chodzi tu tylko o dzieciństwo, ale ten szalony okres dla kraju, gdzie w tym króliczym pędzie połknęliśmy wszystko, co nowe. Nawet nie patrzyliśmy na metki, tylko prosto do gęby: żucie i przełykanie. Tak było w latach 90., tak było na początku dwutysięcznych.

Może szkoda tylko, że autorka bardziej się nie odsłoniła. Brakuje trochę czegoś bardziej osobistego, ale widocznie nie miała na to jeszcze ochoty.

Polecam, bo to przecież fajna rzecz - raz jeszcze zerknąć na przeszłość, którą też miałeś lub miałaś. To zresztą po trosze niesamowite, że wszyscy byliśmy tak daleko od siebie, a jednocześnie, przez ten szereg wydarzeń, rzeczy, polonezów, autobusów ogórków, wyjazdów do Ustki, byliśmy tak blisko siebie.

Ach, tytuł "To był najlepszy koniec świata", bo rzeczywiście tamten świat już się skończył, ale przecież był najlepszy. I jadąc dalej, cytując fragment z "Finlandii" zespołu Świetliki:

Nigdy nie będzie tak pysznych ciastek Reprezentacja naszego kraju nie będzie miała takich wyników Już nigdy nigdy nie będzie takich wędlin takiej coca coli

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Unexpected blow. Absolutely. I simply couldn’t assume that a sci‑fi comic that looks so modest would hit with such force. Of course, I know where it comes from — mainly from the construction, in which a thriller and a family drama, above all a father‑focused one, unfold on the same plane. Perhaps I’m already revealing too much? In any case, whenever a story touches on the relationship between a father and a daughter at a moment when one of them is on the verge of leaving (work, travel, divorce, growing up), something in me always cracks. This time was no different, and that’s only one layer of the album.

Pelaez (the writer) builds the story like a puzzle, where every panel may be a clue, so it’s worth reading attentively. This is not a linear tale about a space mission but a record of identity disintegration. The protagonist, Daniel Nikto, is a man, an astronaut, who begins to lose trust in his own memories.

There is a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons — that’s the central theme. There is guilt (because Daniel’s expedition is supposed to last two years), there is a fracture in the marriage, an illness has occurred, and all of this is only the beginning. The writer does not spare Daniel, but in doing so, he does not spare me, the reader, either. I felt all of it deeply — which speaks well of the reading experience.

I wrote about modesty, and indeed that’s the case, but beneath the narrative and stylistic surface lie two creative temperaments — Philippe Pelaez’s precise, cinematic thinking and Guénaël Grabowski’s cool, realistic drawing. Their collaboration had already matured earlier; I first encountered the duo in the comic Nine — the moods were similar, though the emotional register was less intense.

The genesis of the album is rooted in a fascination with science fiction as a genre that can function primarily as a psychological space. It is precisely on the psychological level that the aforementioned thriller strikes so strongly, blending bluntly with other currents. It works very effectively — events unfold quickly, but nothing is rushed. Thanks to the narration, we can piece everything together ourselves; it works because the narrative brackets close naturally, nothing feels forced, and there are no gaps. The blows fall evenly, the protagonist bends under their weight gradually, until the finale, when the writer no longer needs to inflict further painful experiences. Everything plays out within the grip of uncertainty.

Grabowski, meanwhile, reinforces that uncertainty visually. Realistic drawing brings coldness, sometimes symmetrical compositions. In the space sequences, black, blue, and metallic gray dominate — colors that not only build atmosphere but also emphasize the protagonist’s isolation.

Yes, this is a heavy comic, and the first bleak moods arrive quite quickly. Overall, the album works best as a study of disintegration. Not as a thriller, though it has its pace. Not as epic sci‑fi, though it uses the full arsenal of that capacious genre. There are familiar patterns here; the authors often walk well‑trodden paths. I see the outstanding film Moon (2009, Duncan Jones), and traces of Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle). No matter how many influences I point out, Nikt will always return to the themes of loneliness, guilt, the breakdown of family bonds, and the fear of losing control over one’s own body and mind.

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Yes, I definitely need to go back to the previous Bouncer albums. Could I, as someone entering the world created by Jodorowsky and Boucq for the first time, feel out of place here? Not at all. Above all, this is a universal story, rooted as deeply as possible in a genre whose task this time—alongside all its usual attributes—is to expose the rotten core of human nature.

There are no sentimental moments here, only raw meat. People are greedy, the Wild West swarms with killers, and nobility lies face‑down in the mud. What’s more, there’s only one (maybe two) brief notes referencing events from earlier albums. And the authors lay out the story so efficiently at the beginning that I step into the plot on the move and understand everything.

I feel at home in the western genre; I can recognize archetypal heroes and antiheroes. Bouncer, as the main protagonist, slips out of those brackets, even though he isn’t the dominant figure here. The story and the atmosphere remain the most important. And here comes another surprise: Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Boucq steer the narrative away from classic formulas—at first, it’s unclear who stands on the light side and who on the dark. The cards are dealt in the first act; only the players still need to fully grasp the rules.

As a writer, Jodorowsky shows no mercy. He introduces true horsemen of the apocalypse into the game, men who have set their sights on the gold stored in the bank. Classic, yet not entirely. That gold isn’t meant to stay in town for long. The bank owner is waiting for reinforcements sent by the U.S. government, and for now he and the townsfolk must make do with hastily dispatched protection. But something is wrong with that protection—they’re brutal, they trample into the lives of the locals, and a stench of death follows them. Bouncer is the first to understand it.

This is not the aesthetic of a classic western that loves the contrast of desert and sky. It’s an aesthetic close to revisionism. The atmosphere of the entire album stands near that of Eastwood’s Unforgiven—especially the finale: constant rain, a grim aura, death preparing beds for the incoming pack of corpses.

The color palette is muted, built on browns, greys, and dirty greens. In short—it’s the aesthetics of decay, something deeply depressive. Jodorowsky, whom I know mainly from his films and sometimes mystical narrative constructions, works here in a far more grounded register. Hécatombe has nothing metaphysical about it—it’s a western about consequences. About the fact that gold is always a curse, and violence is never a one‑time event.

I don’t know Bouncer well as a character, but he seems to appear here as a tragic figure (and I assume he was framed similarly in previous albums). Supposedly he has nothing to lose, yet he keeps losing something.

The central point is the gold. Everyone knows perfectly well what that motif brings. Gold is not wealth but a disease. It introduces chaos that shatters social structures. There is much here about moral decay. It’s a comic that is strong, harsh, but above all honest in showing violence and its consequences—without romanticism or romantic gestures. The Wild West and a wild world.

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Whenever an answer appeared, several new questions immediately sprang to life. Locked in a room for ten years, Gotō spent four volumes trying to figure out what exactly he had done in the past (a distant past, since we’re talking about school‑day events) that made someone spend a monstrous amount of money to arrange such a peculiar spectacle.

For the main character’s adversary, this is the “project” of a lifetime. He sacrificed a great deal to build an entire network around Gotō. He deceived him, staged numerous fictional encounters. Now, after the fourth volume, I feel that Gotō is (at least somewhat) a counterpart to Truman from The Truman Show. Jim Carrey’s Truman also tried to break free from the trap; everyone misled him, and for a long time he didn’t know why he was being watched.

Among Polish readers of the manga Old Boy—or so I suspect—there’s a fairly consistent pattern. Most watched Chan‑wook Park’s outstanding film first, and only then moved on to the manga. That’s simply how the publishing timeline worked; there was no other way.

And both on the level of the film medium and on the level of manga storytelling, everything aligns. The two works function independently; the filmmakers used the skeleton and told the story in their own way. The atmosphere was preserved, because the manga by Nobuaki Minegishi (art) and Garon Tsuchiya (script) reaches a kind of mastery here—and that was worth holding onto. Genre‑wise, it’s an excellent urban thriller, with vivid characters, a whole gallery of shady types, and a protagonist we genuinely root for.

The urban labyrinth of Old Boy is an extremely unpleasant space—Tokyo is cold, empty, stripped of romance. It’s hard to grasp anything positive here; I had the impression that everything was sliding downward, and from chapter to chapter a fracture appeared in Gotō’s personality—the man was falling apart. Especially once he starts agreeing to everything—“in a week it will all be over,” which in practice means: let it end, quickly, however it must.

The entire road to the finale is tension built with genius—both in the foreground and among the secondary characters, who are so crucial to this story.

But then… the finale arrives, and I didn’t feel what I was counting on most, what I wanted to feel again (I was prepared, ready for the blows). I already had a hunch, once there were so few pages left, that it might not work. The writer simply didn’t have enough time to deliver the punch. The film’s ending was like nailing the viewer to the wall, dragging out their insides—after that, no one could sleep peacefully. The manga’s ending is indeed bitter, sad, and truthful, but Gotō could just as well sum it up with a single word: “okay,” and walk away. Either I’m not sensitive enough, or reading it through the lens of knowing the film (knowing it well) shaped my reaction in this particular way. Still, the whole thing is very good. I recommend it.

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Caza the master. In the 1970s and shortly after, at the turn of the two decades when Scenes from Estate Life was created, this album can be read as a set of notes from an experimental proving ground. Yet it is not a proving ground the artist entered to practise anything. What takes place here are manoeuvres carried out by an already accomplished creator, who simply presents himself from different angles, brings out weapons of various calibres, and bombards us, the readers, with a whole arsenal of creative air raids.

The album takes shape in an intriguing way, because it allows us to trace not only the artist’s path as an illustrator, but also the way he matured as a scriptwriter (to put it colloquially, there are many of his personal fascinations here). The first part consists of short stories built around more text, more narrative, engaging, at times reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. The main character is usually Caza’s alter ego (Philippe Cazaumayou), who stumbles into various accidental situations, becomes a witness to some event, a passive or active participant. Things simply happen while he himself lives in a grey housing estate.

The genesis of the cycle grows out of the author’s everyday life: the clash of imagination with the drabness of the suburbs, the need to escape repetition, the intuition that ordinary life hides the potential for hallucination. Caza does not document these events, however, he most often transforms them into a series of visions, always wonderfully rendered in graphics that resist any attempt at categorisation.

Later, we slowly enter more expansive science fiction. Caza writes less, the sentences become shorter, and we move into registers more familiar from his authorial works such as The Age of Darkness or The World of Arkadi. Familiar illustrative devices appear: women’s faces, silhouettes, backgrounds. Yet the form of the short stories remains similar throughout Scenes from Estate Life: they begin in a realistic register, only to shift abruptly into a fantastic mutation.

Caza, as a resident of this estate (and as the aforementioned participant), uses all his observations, fears, and recurring neighbourly situations, for instance the broom‑banging of neighbours longing for a moment of peace and quiet. The recurring broom becomes a leitmotif of the album. The same applies to the secondary characters: they function as figures representing emotional states and collective anxieties.

There is much here about alienation, the monotony of everyday life, the tensions between privacy and social pressure. These elements always lead to some smaller or greater version of a fantastic finale, at least at first. Later, in subsequent chapters, Caza presents himself in his more recognisable form. Surrealism, hard sci‑fi, fantastic worlds, fewer words, more contemplation of the illustrations, those beautiful, dreamt‑up landscapes. Not from dreams or nightmares, but simply from places that must exist somewhere.

I treat Scenes from Estate Life as a key title among the works of the French artist. It captures several transitional moments, but also the instants in which his style and narrative approach slowly transformed from something akin to weird fiction toward science fiction. Outstanding.

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Amazing. To tell a story about a fantastical world without words, without a single line of dialogue, without even a fragment of text to define the setting. But do we actually need any of that? We don’t, because from the very beginning we understand what kind of comic this is. What kind of story we’re about to face.

It’s the tale of a beautiful woman from a fantastic world—just as dangerous and wild as it is, at times, lascivious. The same blonde heroine who wakes up one morning in her hut begins another day. It’s likely a kind of routine: she wakes, stretches, flicks a mosquito off her shapely backside, then mounts a great flying creature and heads deeper into the mysterious (though not to her!) land.

Serpieri returns to his iconic character after years, but he does it differently than before. He abandons words, strips the narrative clean, and leaves only the image. The result is an album that doesn’t so much expand the myth of Druuna as reveal its foundations.

To me, this world—the girl’s path—is a kind of dream. The landscapes, rather empty as if nothing should distract us; the monsters; and the erotic raptures are monumental, filtered through Serpieri’s obsession with corporeality. In every frame the heroine looks ready for a centerfold. Even if we understand nothing, it hardly matters—we’re meant to feel this sticky, strange world, its brutality, its peculiar atmosphere.

Serpieri’s drawing remains hypnotic throughout the album. His line is meticulous, full of delicate hatching that gives bodies texture and weight.

The album functions as a “volume zero,” but it doesn’t serve as a prequel. It explains nothing and doesn’t organize the chronology. Instead, it offers a kind of peculiar experience. Entering Druuna’s world without a guide felt to me like an attempt to reach the source of the character—when Druuna is not yet a fully formed heroine but an idea, a concept. A beautiful, unsettling album, one you can sink into like something abstract, always exquisitely drawn.

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Druuna Anima

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Saying that the humor here is heavy‑handed would be an understatement. And yet, if you don’t quickly accept the deliberately mocking convention, you’re done for. You’ll bounce off it and waste your precious time reading Commissaire Toumi.

Anouk Ricard, the French author, blends a childlike aesthetic with adult irony. The key to truly conscious reading is understanding this artistic mannerism. This is certainly not a comic for everyone, but it’s also impossible to ignore. Ricard takes the rules of the classic detective story, dismantles them, and reassembles them into something that resembles a funhouse mirror more than a genre homage. And yet—paradoxically—it’s precisely in this distortion that I see a great deal of affection for the medium.

On the level of plot, Commissaire Toumi is a French police parody. Toumi and Stucky (a dog and a cat—of course) took their police exams together, share an office, and solve criminal cases side by side. There are several such cases in the album. Each one, despite the caricatural form (in both drawing and writing), is actually quite serious—murders, kidnappings, more murders. If you stripped them of their parodic qualities and placed them in a realistic setting, leaving only the criminal essence, the stories would be unsettling, dark, and grimy. But what we have here is a comedy, with humor that is, as I wrote at the beginning, sometimes very crude. The kind of joke that makes you pause, think “hmm… alright, let’s move on,” even though something inside you snorts, because you’re supposedly an adult, yet that teenager in you still wakes up.

Toumi, a police dog with the mannerisms of a worn‑out TV detective, and his inept sidekick Stucky form a duo that could easily function in a classic buddy‑cop movie. They could, if the writer‑illustrator didn’t constantly undercut that seriousness—even within a single panel. Stucky casually remarks that the commissioner has a stain on his pants because he shit himself. My friends, this is the kind of humor you’ll have to face here.

The key, then, is understanding both the convention and the form itself. Ricard’s world is inhabited by anthropomorphic animals who behave like characters from TV procedurals but look like figures from children’s books. That dissonance is crucial: it creates tension between form and content, innocence and grotesque.

Ricard’s illustrations appear simple: clear outlines, flat color fields, panels built on repetition—recognizable gestures and expressions that return after just a few pages. Pushing further into this abstract humor, you’ll notice absurd props (often at bizarre, mismatched scales), all of which amplify the situational comedy. The color palette works the same way—intense, even loud—emphasizing the contrast between the childlike aesthetic and the brutality of certain scenes. My favorite moment is the sliced sausage—I stared at that grotesque scene for a long time, almost struggling to place it properly within my own perception.

The comic succeeds within its peculiar form; it sticks in your memory—and that alone is a significant achievement.

[ponapisach]

Druuna / Serpieri

[ponapisach]

I had no trouble describing Rhapsody in Budapest with a single adjective. That adjective is “elegant” — because above all, this is an elegant spy comic signed by Vittorio Giardino. After “elegant” comes a handful of others: “precise,” “deliberate,” “insightful.” And if we linger for a moment on “precise,” we can move straight to the author himself — a graduate of electrical engineering, an engineer by training, who could hardly have approached this art form in any other way.

I spent a long time thinking about why Rhapsody in Budapest — which is indeed a spy thriller, a multi‑threaded narrative full of diverse characters and intersecting spheres of influence — remains so remarkably clear. It is, of course, Giardino’s craftsmanship, but perhaps also the nature of the character he created.

So, from the beginning. We meet Max Fridman in 1938, already standing somewhat aside from the world. He is no longer an active spy, more a dormant one. When the French discuss bringing him back into service, they speak of him as an “amateur.” And here lies the key to why we, as readers, become so deeply invested in the story. Because Max Fridman — once we get to know him better, but even at the start — seems like a perfectly ordinary man (which is why we can so naturally identify with him). True, he is intelligent and capable of getting himself out of tight situations, but he does not embody any grand qualities that would make him a weapon on the battlefield. It is also hard to think of him as an archetypal special agent. He doesn’t fight particularly well, he lacks the aura of an Ian Fleming spy. He really does seem like an “amateur” — perhaps that is precisely why he is so effective. And the French office needs him, because they want to send him to Budapest, where members of the Rhapsody network are disappearing. It is an offer he cannot refuse, so Fridman goes to Budapest.

It must also be said — and this helps us understand him even more — that Max is a weary protagonist, not a heroic one, pulled into history against his will. He is not a pulp‑style spy. He is a witness to an era, trying to preserve his humanity in a world where every gesture can be read as a political declaration.

Once we arrive in Budapest, I felt a bit as if I were watching Carol Reed’s The Third Man. A city‑labyrinth, a protagonist constantly followed, drawn into suspicious conversations, always in someone’s sights, unable to trust anyone, moving from address to address. He is unsure of his own footing. Truly, I found much in common between Fridman and Martins from Reed’s film. But there is a crucial difference: here we have Budapest in 1938; there, in the film, it was postwar Vienna. In Giardino’s comic, you can feel the prewar tension. The reader knows what will happen the following year; the “light side” in Rhapsody in Budapest still has some hope — or perhaps they simply cannot believe that Europe is about to burn.

Returning to the adjective “elegant,” this elegance permeates the entire work. Having written about the narrative, it is time to look at the visuals. I think the author’s education had a significant influence on the character of the drawing. The panels are static, often symmetrical, guiding the reader’s eye in a controlled, almost mathematical way. The frames are also quite tight, emphasizing the tension, and Budapest truly becomes a labyrinth.

Thematically, the comic touches on manipulation, fear, and the inevitability of history. But Giardino does not moralize — he shows instead how an individual is pulled into the gears of grand politics, how easy it is to become a pawn in a game whose rules no one bothers to explain. Subtle and deeply mature.