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johnnyideaseed's review
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
God, the art in this is gorgeous!
cetian's review
4.0
Caza expands our world by shattering preconceptions. If we are used to think in terms of a scale where one extreme is absolute misogyny and the other is sacred matriarchy, then we might not be prepared to classify works like Kris Kool or Laïlah. Going through theses pages we need new references. Better yet, we are left to our own devices. Feminism and patriarchy are not enough to face the psychedelic cockiness of Kris Cool or the dark telluric humor of Laïlah.
The french BD genius writes as if from another dimension.
Usually sci-fi narratives are allegories, metaphors. During repressive regimes, sometimes the dictator, the regime and other traits and details of reality are portrayed symbolically, disguised to escape censorship. The device used, many times apparently can be de-codified back, as if the writer achieved what Turing did with his machine, during the war.
So after a great work is done, critics battle over hermeneutics. That happened with Orwell. 1984 should mean this and that, not that other thing and specially not that other thingy.
Some writers, like Ursula K. Le Guin, warn against this. Writers are not messengers. So the fiction craft is not to send a message. And sci-fi is not just a symbolic message. Even if the craft is about creating metaphors about reality.
With Caza, we understand that we cannot simply get the decryption instructions. He is a weaver, a story teller, a creator of fables. As much as a masterful illustrator.
And his worlds do seem to come from another place. They don't just seem to be surrogates for this world. Symbolic representations. They have an inner logic, a coherence and they challenge us.
Going deep in a Caza story, we realize that it is quite easy to create a sci-fi dystopia, in the traditional sense: you take reality and you distort, exaggerate, take to the limit a few elements and just let everything else stay coherent as usual. So it seems strangely familiar, because most of it is as usual.
But Caza makes it from scratch. And builds weirdness on top of otherworldliness. He really explores other possibilities. And he does not worry about the usual frontier of what is sci-fi and what is fantasy: he can make humans do the impossible in a very banal environment or start unexpectedly (as in later works) to draw in a outright hallucinogenic way, suggesting the dilution of the barriers of reality. He uses both the narrative and the art to explore possibilities to his characters.
The space a BD from Caza opens is immensely vaster than other great works. And I can dive into it again and again. I read this one (which is an earlier one, published in 1970) after all 9 tomes of Arkadi's World and several other. And it is satisfying to see where the tendency to diverge into psychedelia came from. And also his very original ideas about sexuality. I have no way to describe them. And I guess that, at different times, different people might have misunderstood them.
The french BD genius writes as if from another dimension.
Usually sci-fi narratives are allegories, metaphors. During repressive regimes, sometimes the dictator, the regime and other traits and details of reality are portrayed symbolically, disguised to escape censorship. The device used, many times apparently can be de-codified back, as if the writer achieved what Turing did with his machine, during the war.
So after a great work is done, critics battle over hermeneutics. That happened with Orwell. 1984 should mean this and that, not that other thing and specially not that other thingy.
Some writers, like Ursula K. Le Guin, warn against this. Writers are not messengers. So the fiction craft is not to send a message. And sci-fi is not just a symbolic message. Even if the craft is about creating metaphors about reality.
With Caza, we understand that we cannot simply get the decryption instructions. He is a weaver, a story teller, a creator of fables. As much as a masterful illustrator.
And his worlds do seem to come from another place. They don't just seem to be surrogates for this world. Symbolic representations. They have an inner logic, a coherence and they challenge us.
Going deep in a Caza story, we realize that it is quite easy to create a sci-fi dystopia, in the traditional sense: you take reality and you distort, exaggerate, take to the limit a few elements and just let everything else stay coherent as usual. So it seems strangely familiar, because most of it is as usual.
But Caza makes it from scratch. And builds weirdness on top of otherworldliness. He really explores other possibilities. And he does not worry about the usual frontier of what is sci-fi and what is fantasy: he can make humans do the impossible in a very banal environment or start unexpectedly (as in later works) to draw in a outright hallucinogenic way, suggesting the dilution of the barriers of reality. He uses both the narrative and the art to explore possibilities to his characters.
The space a BD from Caza opens is immensely vaster than other great works. And I can dive into it again and again. I read this one (which is an earlier one, published in 1970) after all 9 tomes of Arkadi's World and several other. And it is satisfying to see where the tendency to diverge into psychedelia came from. And also his very original ideas about sexuality. I have no way to describe them. And I guess that, at different times, different people might have misunderstood them.
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