Morvan, Bessadi & Trannoy: Zorn & Dirna #3

Zorn and Dirna are two kids who live in a world where Death has been imprisoned and nobody fully dies – if they're killed by decapitation, however, their soul goes into the person who killed them. This has created all sorts of havoc in the world, and to get rid of what is essentially moving, rotting corpses, a "death factory" has been created where such decapitations are done on an industrial scale, by unfortunate people who have to do this sort of slaying until they just can't take it anymore – and they're slain themselves, their souls going into their killer.

Now, Zorn and Dirna have been born into this world with a very valuable talent: together, they can kill somebody properly, releasing their soul from this world. This makes them very valuable, of course, and a lot of players are out to get ahold of them, but as the third album begins, they are together with their father Seldnör – who became a vicious bounty hunter in his grief when he lost his family (before Zorn and Dirna were born) – and the soul of their mother Splata – in the body of the hugely muscular person who decapitated her in the "death factory". Meanwhile, they are being hunted by the evil Crown Prince's army, full of vicious sadists... (My review of #s 1 & 2 is here.)

So, the family is reunited at last, and Zorn and Dirnas mother's soul has become dominant in the body of the man who decapitated her – the shock of seeing her children catapulted her consciousness to the top. Seldnör's love for his wife is reignited, but she is  alas a man now, and this creates some awkward situations. (There are also some sentimental scenes that actually approach "sugary-sweet", which doesn't really fit with the harsh bleakness of the rest of the album.) The kids learn how to use their power for good purposes, like freeing the soul of a tortured, dying animal, but they have other problems than the soldier horde stalking them to deal with: The other souls inhabiting the same body as Splata are getting annoyed with her hogging the body and calling all the shots, and the kindly old lady offering the family shelter from a mountain winter storm isn't all she seems to be. Well, she's an old lady, but she's not exactly kindly.

There is good and bad in the Zorn & Dirna series. The art is good, if occasionally overwhelmed by the coloring, and the world that writer Morvan has created together with Le Gall, Bessadi and and Trannoy is impressive and works very well as a setting – a little bit too well, even, as the full measure of its viciousness is shown to the reader, with the cruelty and gruesomeness shown in explicit detail. It's very unpleasant, and it detracts from my reading experience as I feel it to be more exploitative than honest – especially in conjunction with the sugary sentimentality and melodrama of some other scenes. The subplots hinted at in the third paragraph above are resolved well, however, and overall I consider this a good read worth your while. I just wish they'd toned down the melodramatic parts, both the violence/gore ones and the sentimental ones. There are still ample possibilities to show that a world is horrible without getting quite so gory.

So: Recommended, if not as wholeheartedly as I'd like to – and not for young kids.

Morvan, Bessadi & Trannoy: Zorn & Dirna #1 & #2

Imagine a world where an aging king out of fear for Death prepared a large number of traps and, after a heroic battle lasting several days, finally managed to trap her in a large mirror – a world where now ordinary humans don't die, but merely age and eventually start to rot. A world where the only solution to this is to transport people who've outlived their "best before" date are taken to a giant death factory, where their head is separated from the body. This is the only, grisly, way of releasing the soul, and said soul then unfortunately then takes up residence in the body of the person who did the deed.

If you don't want to imagine such a nasty world, you're in luck; you don't have to. Jean-David Morvan and Yann Legal have already done that for you. Then, Morvan scripted the BD ("bande-dessiné", that is "comics" in French) album series about Zorn & Dirna, two kids growing up orphaned in this terrible world. They've been brought up and trained by the king's man, Master Erken, under whose tutelage they've learned how to, really and truly, kill. When they simultaneously touch somebody, human or animal, and concentrate, they can kill that person, releasing the soul without it taking up residence in either of them.

If you think that is somewhat creepy, you'll have to be prepared for worse, because at least one of the kids really likes her awesome power, and wants to use it for fun. Also, being kids, they don't have quite the self-discipline not to use that power when they get really angry with somebody...

Complicating things is an extremely ruthless, ronin-type bountyhunter who is supposed to escort the kids to the king. Turns out not only has he issues of his own to deal with, horrible enough to explain how he became the near-monster he is painted as in the first album, he is also not entirely successful in his mission; instead, the kids end up in the very death factory they're supposed to make superfluous.There, they end up under the axe of the man who severed their mother's head from her body...

The back story to this album series is powerful, if somewhat grisly and ugly. It's also disturbing to see a kid's glee at her power to kill, and the bloody business of killing (and some other distasteful stuff) is perhaps depicted a tad enthusiastically. And the coloring, especially in the first album but also to some extent in the second, is done in an often rather insensitive, flat manner, even when the colorist is trying to "paint", and sometimes even drowns out the line artwork – a cardinal sin. It gets better in the second album, but I'm still not happy with it. It might be a problem with the Swedish printing, or it might be that the coloring is done on computer and looks different there (where the light comes from behind the colored art, and isn't reflected from it), but either way, it's not really satisfactory. (Take out your old Tintin albums to see an excellent example of how one does coloring that really supports the storytelling instead of overpowering it.)

But the good things about this series are stronger than the mainly minor complaints I have. The artwork is a bit on the cartoony side (somewhat compensated for by the coloring though, despite my reservations about it), the characters are strong, the back story (as I've already said) powerful, and the storyline is – once it gets really going in the second album – not merely interesting but quite fascinating. (And in the second album, the translator also handles the difference between the French "vous" – the plural or respectful "you" – better in the first, so there are improvements in all respect – story, writing, color, translation.)

The setting, this world where Death has disappeared, strikes me as something that could have been created by some of the more imaginative sfi-fi writers of the fifties-sixties golden age, like Philip José Farmer for example. These days, with the rise of the fantasy genre, it becomes a fantasy story instead, and one that is well worth reading. 

Recommended. You want to judge the look of the story for yourselves, you can find samples from the Swedish editions here.