My review this week was for the lovely and intense “anti-fairly tale, Beautiful Darkness, by French comics writer Fabien Vehlmann and the husband and wife artist team Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset (known together as Kerascoët):
Beautiful Darkness begins at a lovely tea party with a Princess-like Aurora entertaining her would-be paramour, the dashing, princely Hector. She serves cakes and hot chocolate, aided by her friend and wannabe handmaiden, Plim. Everything is going swimmingly as the cooing couple lean in for their first kiss. Suddenly, the sky starts falling. Weeping, stinky pink goo begins to rain down all around and over them, into their cocoa, onto their heads. Soon they are struggling against drowning as the putrefaction fills the room. But as Aurora, now panicked and separated from the others, finally finds her opening to freedom, we realize that the thwarted tea party was inside the decaying corpse of a little girl in the woods. As the Lilliputian Aurora crawls from her nostril into the rainy darkness, a “wide shot” image shows dozens of other tiny people fleeing from every orifice of the decaying child.
And then the story becomes seriously sick, twisted, and sad.
Read the entire review here.
Mind Bone: Gareth Branwyn's Blog 