siskoid 's review for:

Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann

5.0

---

Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët's Beautiful Darkness is an incredible graphic novel, filled with grotesque beauty, like something Baudelaire might have dreamed (by way of The Secret World of Arrietty). A little girl dies in the forest, and all the characters from her imagination come spilling out of her corpse and found a colony around it. Aurora, her namesake and nominal avatar, seems the only positive figure, but even she might be drawn into violence and evil as the girl decomposes. Kerascoët's art is cartoonish, bordering on the abstract when working on the toy-like characters, but then adopts a detailed, realistic style when he pulls out to show the macro-world, in all cases applying a gorgeous watercolor treatment on his pages. As to the story, it's more a portrait of a deteriorating society than any kind of straightforward plot, Vehlmann often crafting one-or-two-page "gag" strips (common in the Euro-comics tradition) that show where his tiny monsters are at in their development. Images both beautiful and horrific meant to stay with you forever.