BARBARELLA

Writer & Artist: Jean-Claude Forest
English Language Adaptation: Kelly Sue Deconnick | U.S. Edition Editor: Alex Donoghue

I'm not sure what I just read.

I mean, I understand in general, but...

Okay, let's see. I had known of BARBARELLA for years as some kind of campy sci-fi movie from the sixties starring Jane Fonda in a fur bikini. I think I later learned it was based on the work of a French cartoonist. I never saw the movie, but I always thought the comic might be fun to check out someday. Eventually, last year around the time I began to get into digital comics with that big IDW sale I mentioned a while back, I saw a bargain-priced digital edition of BARBARELLA and picked it up. I just read it over the past couple days, and like I said...

I'm not sure what I just read.

BARBARELLA is indeed a sci-fi story, about young woman who keeps getting into all sorts of random predicaments. We begin the story en media res as her spaceship crashes on a planet called Lythion. Barbarella gets involved in a war between the locals and eventually brings about peace between the two warring factions.

Soon after, she hitches a ride on a cargo ship with a captain named (seriously) Dildano and encounters the legendary Medusa under the sea on another planet. This segues into a new adventure as Barbarella and Dildano continue to explore their strange new world. Barbarella finds herself once more drawn into a conflict between two local powers. She infiltrates the home of a sinister hunter named Strickno, dons her famous fur bikini, and gets him killed by one of his own animals.

MUSE (SONGES)

Writer: Denis-Pierre Filippi | Artist: Terry Dodson
Colorists: Rebecca Rendon & Terry Dodson | Translators: Quinn & Katia Donoghue

In 2004, France's Les Humanoïdes Associés published SONGES: CORALINE, volume one in a 2-book series written by Denis-Pierre Filippi and illustrated by Terry Dodson. The second volume, SONGES: CÉLIA, was finally released eight years later in 2012, and Humanoids, Inc. -- the American branch of Les Humanoïdes Associés -- released an English-language version collecting both books in one volume, retitled MUSE.

I'm not sure how, but I became aware of this book around 2008 and based on the images I found online, I fell in love with the artwork. Yes, it contains a ton of gratuitous cheesecake -- half the reason for hiring Terry Dodson, who here is able to shed far more clothes from his female protagonist than he'd be allowed in any mainstream American comic book -- but there's more to his work than that in these pages. The book is set primarily on the grounds of a sprawling estate in what is most likely rural France, at some undetermined point in the past. Dodson puts such remarkable work into the setting that one almost feels transported there through his illustrations, which appear to be reproduced directly from pencil art for a very "natural" feel, and which are complemented astoundingly by the lush color work of Rebecca Rendon and Dodson himself.

Our tale follows a young lady named Coraline, who arrives at the estate in response to an ad for a caretaker. Her charge is to be a brilliant boy named Vernère, who spends his days in a secret workshop constructing astounding mechanical devices, brewing unusually powerful nectars, and reading book after book. Coraline's job, as outlined by Vernère's housemaid and butler, is to get him out of the workshop and to help him rediscover his youth. And if Dodson's illustrations of the setting are a large part of the charm of this book, then his work on Vernère's fantastical devices is the other major attraction (taking his delightful renderings of Coraline in all manner of dress and undress for granted, of course). This stuff has sort of a turn-of-the-century steampunk vibe and while Steampunk as a genre has never really appealed to me, seeing such devices in this almost fairytale-like setting is very cool.