…the vision on display here is a dark and unsettling one marked by blood, slime and decay. Aurora, however, cooks up a truly nasty way to enact revenge on Zelie and her minions, and reclaim her former status. Not that Aurora’s own place in this hierarchy is too secure, as a girl named Zelie, who possesses doll-like features and an impeccable fashion sense, gradually comes to usurp her. The society she heads quickly divides its citizenry into beautiful people and outcasts (in the form of a weird girl who takes shelter in the corpse’s hair, and feasts on the maggots that inevitably come to devour the body). The leader of the miniature child-dynasty is a girl who christens herself Aurora (after the name written on a school journal belonging to the corpse). The miniature kids attempt to construct a civilization in the vegetation surrounding the body, a situation that recalls classic children’s stories ranging from PICCOLI to HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS, although Vehlmann, Pommepuy and Cosset have a much grander purpose in mind: their aim is nothing less than a LORD OF THE FLIES-esque allegory of western civilization.

The protagonists are a group of ant-sized children who find themselves stuck inside the nostrils of the corpse of a normal-sized girl. The story and watercolor artwork harken back to past eras, which seems quite deliberate on the parts of Vehlmann, Pommepuy and Cosset, who present this twisted story in the form of a fairy tale. I strongly doubt you’ll be finding this book in too many school libraries. Don’t be fooled, though: the vision on display here is a dark and unsettling one marked by blood, slime and decay. A bestseller it wasn’t, but its 2015 English language debut by Drawn & Quarterly has drawn a fair amount of mainstream attention. Translated Euro comics tend to be a pretty slow-moving field (I’m still surprised that so few people have taken notice of the English version of Philippe Druillet’s amazing THE NIGHT), but BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS, a French graphic novel scripted by Fabien Vehlmann and illustrated by “ Kerascoët” (Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset), appears to have bucked the trend (it being a publication that, for once, I didn’t find out about until after most everybody else). By FABIEN VEHLMANN, KERASCOËT (Drawn & Quarterly 2009/15)

Beautiful darkness by fabien vehlmann