Hot Jazz: November 2017

Something I'm very excited about come November is a newly translated from the French classic "Niourk":

The sample pages are stunning, and Stefan Wul is a writer I've been interested in since seeing his animated collaboration with Rene Laloux "Fantastic Planet":

Looks like they liked "Fantastic Planet" more than "Savage Planet" for the translation?

Stefan Wul wrote the stories that both of these are based upon, and since he died a while back, I'm not sure he was involved with the graphic novel Niourk.

The last few Hot Jazz posts have been about either ongoing series (Grass Kings) or miniseries (Eleanor and the Egret), but this is a longer and denser offering, and one I'm excited to get into.

Weird side note: I came across Fantastic Planet while researching Rene Laloux, and I learned about Laloux from a short animated piece he made called "Les Escargots (The Snails)", and that short was buried on a DVD of hundreds of animated shorts from the thirties and forties, all of which were public domain and after the government put the kibosh on the racier items in animated shorts (which means they were crushingly boring). It was fully out of place among the dreck; it was in color, and lovingly made, and French, and looked thirty years newer than anything else on the DVD. How I even saw it while cleaning the house or making dinner in between gin and tonics is still a mystery to me...