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