Kairos

November 11, 2019
Malassagne’s stunningly illustrated fantasy (his English-language debut) opens quietly, with bespectacled Nills and his enigmatic girlfriend, Anaelle, visiting her family’s cabin in the countryside. But after dinosaurlike dragon people teleport out of the fireplace to abduct Anaelle, the pastoral kicks into nonstop action. Anaelle is revealed to be a princess who fled to Earth from another world, now recaptured to face a terrible fate. Nils follows her to the realm of dragons, where his rage transforms him into a creature of unstoppable strength, and he slices a path to the palace where Anaelle is imprisoned—shedding his humanity, which had drawn Anaelle to him, along the way. (“Humans can experience love to the point of madness,” a dragon rebel explains.) The artwork, with cartoony characters hacking, slashing, and clawing their way through detailed otherworldly settings with deeply hatched shadows, suggests some of the better manga of the 1970s–1980s, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. But it also has a cool, loose French comics feel, similar to the self-aware ouevre of Joann Sfar. The result offers an unpredictable, deconstructionist take on the hoary premise of the hero rescuing the princess, with energetic art that goes a long way toward selling the trope.