Content over form
Fins de siècle tell an alternative story in which fighters created for the purpose of the comic book fight in the renewed Spanish Civil War. The first part of the volume (all written by Pierre Christin) tells about the slow end of the Soviet Union and the decline of socialist tendencies on the Old Continent. The historical background of the events described in this episode is required to fully enjoy reading. The story itself is built in a simple way, but the heroes turned out to be a big problem. I do not know if this is due to the line characteristic of Bilal, which confuses the viewer with very similar characters. In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish the people depicted in the frames, and their too quickly presented historical background causes them to disappear in the multitude of figures whose actions drive the plot. A similar disadvantage can be seen in the next part, i.e. the story about hunting in the Bieszczady Mountains. If you enter too many characters too quickly, they merge into a single mass, which means that we receive their next actions with less enthusiasm.
Great setting
Apart from similar, slightly different faces, it must be said that in terms of realism, Bilal’s drawings are fantastic. Dark, gloomy landscape and worn colors allow us to feel a shiver running down our spine. These are not places where the reader wants to be, and you can only feel sorry for the heroes that the creators decided to push them into such a brutal and realistic picture of the world. It works especially well in winter sequences, where while reading, we ourselves want to put on thick gloves and finish reading in a buttoned jacket.
Words, words and more words
Several times, especially during the second part of the story, I found myself unconsciously flipping through a comic, forgetting what I had just read. This is due to the fact that a large part of the dialogues reminds me of long hours of chats on political topics of my uncles, who describe their views with specific names, incomprehensible allegories or by challenging all the options of political compasses. On the other side, I was a bit fed up with it, waiting for the thread to move forward a bit. It actually happened, although the characterology of the characters could be developed with slightly more creative treatments.
It will be hard to get through this title for someone who is not interested in history and politics to the least extent involved. If you like stories set in the conflicted Europe of the 20th century, this comic is definitely for you. If not, and you don’t feel like doing a lot of research before reading, just let it go and turn to Enki Bilal’s other works.
