A boy and a fly
This time it starts with a flashback. Two brothers are reading a fairy tale together about a little boy who could fly. This theme will become the theme of the second volume of the Lambert series. He will also identify associations that may arise for readers. Peter Pan will definitely appear in them , but also Lord of the Flies , not only because of the title “creature”. For the author of the City of Outcasts, the figure of an insect boy is both the protagonists’ origin and the proverbial end of the world that must be stopped by Jacgues Peuplier.
As you probably remember from the previous volume, the special talent of a detective from a run-down metropolis is talking to rubbish. Except Jacques has just lost his power, and he has to use a standard investigative method that he sincerely detests – interviews with real people. He cannot take a vacation, because firstly he wants to solve the mystery of the “flying old man” and the zombies related to him somehow, and secondly – Christina, found by him, has disappeared again. Peuplier rolls up the sleeves of his black blouse and goes in search of a certain little shit (those are his words!) Who might know something.
Lost children
Abandoned factories are the perfect HQ for bad guys looking to destroy (possibly improve) the world, and for gangs of underage combiners. The kids created a specific community with their own rules. This is something bordering on a book by Golding and Mad Max . In this thread, you can clearly see the manga inspirations that Lambert sometimes refers to. Everyone is constantly moving, trying to look cool and original, making faces and making speeches in the style of Bond villains.
The title of this volume tells us that the boy whom we met in the previous issue will be the most important figure in this gang of kids without pockets. He wanders the city laden with a huge backpack and with a cat at his feet. For Peuplier, it will turn out to be the key to solving the puzzle, but also an inconvenient ballast. Looking at the little one, he will seriously consider his attitude towards others, loneliness and distance to everyone. And this is where the classics of French cinema , led by Leon the professional, will come to mind .
The end and the beginning
The boy who collected the creatures closes most of the plots in the first volume. He does it in an epic style worthy of Japanese science fiction cinema and in the atmosphere of decent post-apocalyptic industrial. Introducing kids as important heroes gave Lambert the opportunity to refer to family productions (insert any adventure movie that admits his fascination with Goonies ). I think that’s one of the reasons you can pass this comic to teenagers, but not to younger children. In any case, check first for yourself that the “flying old man” and the dramatic scenes from the end of this volume will not be too brutal for them.
The first two volumes of City of Outcasts are a closed story, at least if we think about closing the plot. Julien Lambert, however, wants to develop this series further, and on his Facebook you can see a few charts from the next issue. Over the course of these several hundred pages, you can see how the author’s style is gradually changing. He becomes more and more individual, with a shaky line and a tendency from manga caricature. In our plot, you can find similar things, for example, in Knight Janek .
The City of Outcasts is a rich, interesting series. If you are interested in contemporary European comics, you will undoubtedly want to meet her. It will fit the recently published Polish version of Nagalyod , slightly more erudite comics than Margins, but also the new Image Comics series or Inio Asano’s manga. The comic also refers to the cyberpunk with his vision not so much of a post-apocalypse, but of a slowly dying world in which no explosion occurred, but simply ran out of resources.
