Broken Frontier

In older times, people didn't possess the science to let them understand the world to such an extend as today. Stories often resulted in a Deus Ex Machina ending, a god is trotted out to point the finger and make everything right again because that is how people's thought processes were wired. Causal stories were abruptly cut off because causality could only took you so far. Stories are how we understand the world.  

Stitching on a moral or a bout of wisdom often lends an air of satisfaction to the proceedings in a story. Heroes win and evil gets their dues. Fairy tales however aren't always that cookie clear and can be the exception to the rule. Being a sort of folk lore, the distinction often concerns magic, talking animals and the existence of actual fairies. In Older Times by Joan Sfar, the legendary co-founder of L'Association, certainly meets these requirements and as for a blurry line between good and evil, it certainly rivals anything in the older fairy tales before Charles Perrault or the cleaning up operation of the Grimm Brothers. Joan Sfar pulls it all out of his hat : violence, romance, intrigues and baser desires are trotted out to fit the characters and as is often the case with Sfar, religion and love form the undercurrents of the story.

In a magical world where water flows upstream, Cassian is a lousy sorcerer's apprentice, in love with the sorcerer's granddaughter Nadine, an attractive teenage girl who has magical water powers and whose puberty is breaking through. Wanting to explore the world and looking for an alpha male, she asks her grandfather to come up with a lie to spare Cassian's heart. The lie spins out of control and sets Cassian upon a quest to protect Nadine and free the old Gods from the tyranny of the One True God. 

Being a philosophy major Joan Sfar's In Older Times can be a bit daunting to read. Most characters aren't exactly sympathetic but rather egocentric and blind to other people's desires. Often, the characters less devoid of morals are the more sympathetic ones, functioning more as a philosophical sound board and mirror for the main character's feelings. Sfar excels at this type of turnover tricks, imbibing the good with the bad and vice versa but for this series he seems to fore-go on his trademark humour. This choice in storytelling all makes it a bit heavy handed though resulting in characters spouting soliloquies ad maximum. 

There's also no discernable theme running through the book, more than a few things come to the front but nothing takes center stage: naivety is played out against cynicism, the dangers of monotheismare touched upon and seems like a theme that will run through the series of volumes while the power of Stories is explored leading even to a character that will only get turned on when you tell her a story. Sfar also seems to be mixing fairy tales with religious tales though maybe the mixing itself is the message. 

Story wise, the volume lingers a bit without making it all too clear on what exactly the end goal is. The quest to free the old gods is a made up story though the One True God seems to be real, there's not a learning curve for both naive Cassian or teenage manipulator Nadine or the Queen who beds a unicorn and who lost her king to Nadine in fox disguise. And in the end, the story just ... stops and it turns out that another volume is forthcoming. 

As always, Sfar's scribbly pen drawings (with intermittent brush work) is energetic, charming and chaotic. His creature work especially reaches a high level with imaginative trolls, deformed giants, unicorns and fairies populating dense cross work panels. His characters are distinctive enough that his sometimes deformation of the facial work doesn't matter but comes across as a side effect of his chaotic renderings. It's hard to describe it as outright beautiful but there's also beauty in the madness of his line work.

In Older Times Vol. 1 Joan Sfar threads upon a - for him - familiar artistic road. Imagining a fairy tale with queens bedding unicorns, sorcerers seducing nimfs with stories and a naive hero on a quest to protect a teenage witch from the One True God, he seems to imbue his free flowing storytelling with re-numerations about religion and the importance of story but without imbuing the story with some humour or a sense of direction. The first volume (of how many is not indicated) does not provide any answers and though I find plenty to like, spreading the tale across multiple volumes makes me question the validity of a serial with such a heavy handed story.

In Older Times : The King Does not Kiss Vol. 1 by Joan Sfar is published in Dutch by Oog & Blik. The OGN is 142 pages long and retails for € 24.90.