Fabien Vehlmann

What a weird and wonderful comic. This darkly comic fairy tale brings to life the unsettling world of childhood imagination, reminding us that the whimsical and the disturbing are two sides of the same coin. Here are childlike sprites whose play inevitably ends in gruesome violence, and an enchanted woodland populated by charming mice in tailcoats but also predators and grubs. And of course, there's a (somewhat understated) darkness at the center of this book—the sprites have tumbled out into reality because the young girl who dreamed them up lies dead in the woods.

I feel like many comics of this kind excel at atmosphere but fall short on plot, but Beautiful Darkness acquits itself well on both counts, with a pleasing, if unsettling, fairy tale arc. And the artwork is perfect—vivid, expressive, and with plenty of nods to Victorian children's book illustrators.

Recommended to fans of gothic comics and weird fantasy, and a readalike for Emily Carroll's Through the Woods.… (more)

Wow, this is one of the weirdest books I remember reading. Deeply creepy and macabre (it's not for the squeamish), but beautiful with it. A little of The Gashlycrumb Tinies mixed with Lord of the Flies, depicted in a fairy-tale pallet. But that still doesn't give an adequate sense of what to expect. At heart, it's a slightly meandering story of how children behave in a group, with the kindnesses and loyalties and cruelties and jealousies that involved, with plenty of dark and deadly twists along the way. And the children are weird, tiny forest folk. I'm missing one of the most singular things of the book on purpose (and which you may well already know), because it actually has little to do with the plot, and also shapes expectations of the book so much that I feel like it is misleading to mention it. But you probably already know.… (more)

A gorgeously illustrated book, this tale wraps around and circles both its characters and its readers. It's easy to fall into and devour in one sitting, and the creepy moments are so incredibly tantalizing, it's hard for a horror-lover like me not to fall in love with this book. All that said, I admit I have a hard time slowing down enough to really focus on the way graphic novels tell so much story through illustrations vs words, and require readers to put together so many pieces to connect the dots. Here, I lost the story thread a few times, and I suspect this is one of those books that may require a few reads in order for everything to be clear. I do wish it had been a bit clearer, in how everything fell together, but the book is such an experience and has such wonderful art, it's hard to complain.

I suspect I'll wander through this one again in the near future and potentially update my review then.… (more)