“We live in a world of SF,” said Vincent Perriot. To prove it to us, he told the story of a dinosaur shepherd on his way to the big city to bring justice. He showed it in a fantastic style, loosely inspired by Moebius, but wanted to convey something about our present reality.
The comic book has a very rich aesthetic. The futuristic city drawn by Perriot is overwhelming in size and full of people. They are decorated with elements borrowed from ancient and traditional cultures of Africa, Oceania and the Far East. The main character, Jarri, is a secretive and introverted boy, but the reader has no problem understanding his motivations. Even an imminently impending revolution makes sense. And if it weren’t for the very last end … The need for morality is the only problematic aspect of Negalyod, at least from my point of view.
A desert full of dinosaurs
Negalyod’s action takes place in a place that I associate irresistibly with Latin America – possibly partly due to the association with the excellent comic book Sword of Ages by Gabriel Rodríguez. Rusty, orange deserts, rocky mountains, people dressed in clothing collected over the years, full of patches, but always at least a little decorative. Through such a landscape, Jarri chases his herd of Chasmosaurs, following the traditional route along the great aqueduct. The road leads to the market, and then to the city.
Jarri’s life is herding the herd, searching for waterholes, chatting with dinosaurs (yes, the boy understands their speech) and clicking with the girls on some future Tinder. Perriot was interested in the lifestyle of a person who was physically distant from civilization, but in constant contact with it. As he recalls in the interview , from which the first quote also comes, he was inspired by meetings with real Romanian and Greek shepherds. How does someone who is always alone feel, but when he sees tourists from the holidays, he can not only invite them for tea, but also take a photo of them with a smartphone?
Certainly, such a person will not be afraid of the city or feel inferior to its inhabitants. He knows the value of his loneliness and work. So when Jarri’s herd dies due to a crash in a meteor truck crossing the desert, he decides to get justice and punish the guilty. The metropolis is sands of sand, and its best neighborhoods levitate in blue above a rusty, waterless landscape. It is on its top floors that the authorities are in office.
Change the world, this time without Incal
While Perriot’s comic has fantasy elements and a lot of references to Moebius, there is no magic artifact to change the world. You have to do it the old way: meet the right people, master the technology, create a resistance. Fortunately, Jarri is satisfied with the former, because the bumps and constant control from above have long brought the boil to the boil. The action will significantly accelerate, there will be technological and social threads. You will find out who manages the world of Negalyod and why waterworks are so important in it. Perriot draws from the best of dystopian science fiction here.
The finale of the comic draws the reader’s attention to two issues – freedom and connection with others. In this sense, being inspired by the pastoral life made it possible to create a very coherent, broad metaphor of human fate. There will also be an unfortunate moral, which in my opinion was a bit of an easy going, a way to quickly close an album. On the other hand, the ending is open-ended, so we cannot be entirely sure if the actions of the revolutionaries will improve the lives of the desert inhabitants.
Vincent Perriot worked on Negalyod for about two years, he created it non-chronologically, and only after some time did he put the episodes together. This is his debut in this genre, but the author has made several other comic books in which he was a cartoonist, screenwriter, or both. The experience really feels, the narrative is coherent and interesting, the drawings are simply stunning. In my heart, I suppose that many readers will like the ending, even if I do not really appreciate it. In short, it’s a good story, something for fans of Moebius and Jodorowsky (a lot thanks to the colorist Florence Breton), but also people who fancy beautifully drawn dystopian science fiction.