Occasionally you come across a comic that just blows you away. Just happened to me.
Nogegnon by Luc and François Schuiten.

It's the third (and so far last) book in their Terres Creuses (Hollow Earths) series. The story is slight. A woman, Nellie, looking for her friend, Olivia, tracks her to the world of Nogegon which has a very low gravity and a society devoted to symmetry. Nellie steals the ID of a zealous investigator she encounters in a camp of nonconformist outsiders. Using his ID she finds that Olivia has committed suicide after living with a sculptor. She visits the sculptor and destroys his statues of Nellie. Then, in return for the truth about what happened, poses for the sculptor, becomes his lover, discovers that Olivia is not dead but moved on to another world. She encounters another investigator probing the accidental death of the investigator Nellie encountered at the start of the book. Together they return to the nonconformist encampment and Nellie leaves as the investigator realises the rules of symmetry are foolish.

The art in the book is detailed and has a dreamlike quality - the low gravity of the world means people drift airily - I was reminded more than once of the way a lot of Moebius' charactersoften don't quite touch the ground in things like The Incal and The Hermtic Garage.






And it carries on right through to the end of the book panel for panel reversing the motivations and attitudes of all that has come before... and then past the story... because the end papers are inverted as are the covers.


Tricksy and arty maybe, but bloody impressive, and gorgeous to look at.

How are the other books in the Terres Creuses series?

Good, if a bit esoteric.  Schuiten's work is sort of dreamlike.  The Cities of the Fantastic series has amazing images and a little more developed stories (written by Benoit Peeters).  His architectural renderings, in those, are phenomenal, which is no surprise, since his father was an architect.

A relatively inexpensive way to get Fever in Urbicand and The Tower is to collect those issues of Cheval Noir, from Dark Horse.  Both stories were serialized in there and ............................

WHOOPS!

Never mind; I just saw the prices listed for those early issues.  Seriously, way out of whack.  I get they are charging more for the two Dave Stevens covers; but, that is not demand-driven pricing.  My economics professors never looked at an internet-driven collectible market.

At one point, I had all of the NBM editions of his work, but got rid of that stuff before moving.  Used to have a pretty good selection of the Catalan and NBM editions of many European works, especially after cleaning out a store in Charleston, SC, who were happy to move the dead stock and sold them to me for a couple of bucks each.  They had them in a reading box, where they let people pay a buck to read them, but no one ever did.  I completed collections of Torpedo 1936, Vittorio Giardino, The Survivor, the first two books of the Nikopol Trilogy, some other Bilal, Valerian, Code XIII, Rork and a few others.

Best...Haul....Ever......

Well, maybe second best, after I bought a stack of DC and Marvel Treasury Editions, Warrior Magazine, and the Calvin & Hobbes issue of The Comics Journal (one of the few interviews Bill Watterson ever did).  The only reason I didn't buy the Dixie Pistols' "Marauder" album they had was because I didn't have a turntable and was mainly interested in the Scout wedding issue, inside.  Found out years later that it was less a story than a poem, set to illustrations.

Best....European....Haul....Ever!!!!!

Cheval Noir was my intro to Benoit-Peeters also, and I loved those stories. Need to get the actual books one day. I liked a lot of stuff in Cheval Noir, come to think of it.

For another comic that features a trained architect showing off, I submit Blame by Tsutomu Nihei.

On another note, I've just picked up a huge collection of Humanoids comics from Humble Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/). The big draw is the complete Incal (6 volumes) and Metabarons (four series, 17 volumes total) by Jodorowsky and Moebius, plus all ten volumes of Carthago and a few dozen other title sets. In total, 150 books for $25. The supported charity is Hero Initiative. Less than four days to go, if anyone else is interested.

I got 5 European comics after the lockdown lifted (only for order&pickup, no browsing).

I normally don't include scans as I have no scanner, but two of them I love the covers, so I stole images from the internet (hope imgur will comply with me).
So the five in order of enjoyment (though I haven't finished the fifth one yet, so it may go down a bit afterwards):

- Le Maître chocolatier part 2 (The Master Chocolatier) by Eric Corbeyran, Bénédicte Gourdon and Chetville. I've enjoyed Corbeyran's Cognac (even though I had some criticism) and Cafe Noir (which I thought was the better story). So his current entry in his non-series of short thrillers against a culinary background was something I would be checking out. Also it's about chocolate, something I enjoy a lot more than both cognac and coffee. Except, I didn't like this issue at all.
The first issue of this series was a decent setup: Alex Carret is the son of the owner of a large chocolate factory, but is more interested in small scale, manually crafted pieces of art. He sets up his own shop (after leaving his previous job over an argument the way a deaf employee was threated) together with his childhood friend (who he has a crush on) and her ex-boyfriend, who has some business sense (but also enormous gambling debts that he is hiding from his partners).
This issue though: Alex is being sabotaged by his father's second in command for ... reasons? I get there is some jealousy there, but Alex has a small shop, you're in charge of a million dollar company and Alex father seems to like you a lot more than him, so why go through all this trouble? Especially as the risks are pretty high. Alex in turn is grumpy and annoying to everybody around him when things don't go his way. Also Alex, don't date your employee. Even if it's just the two of you in the store, don't date your employee. This only will give trouble.
My main problem with this issue though, is the info dumps characters tell each other regarding preparing chocolate, the harvest of chocolate beans etc. In Cognac, the backdrop was a journalist writing an article on the origins of Cognac, so the info dumps came natural during interviews. In Cafe Noir, the backdrop has an outsider coming in the coffee industry for her specific talent, so she needs to get some quick info on the subject. In the first issue, the info drop was from Alex to his trainee and it worked there as well. Here there is another master-trainee info dump which is fine, but then there is a conversation between two people who know the subject who talk to each other in a "Did you know" and then a long list of taste and chocolate facts which felt very unnatural.
Maybe the conclusion (the series is only 3 issues long) will be better, but this was not very good IMHO.

- Black Moon Chronicles part 17 by Froideval and Fabrice Angleraud: Why do I give the original language title for all these comics, except for Froideval Black Moon Chronicles? I don't know myself. Anyway Emperor Wismerhill and his allies are at war with the race of Serpent People. Massive battles, all told in the far future by Wismerhill's daughter telling her own daughter the story, so no focus on individual characters. Now this series has never been known for any character development or writing, it's always been big action fantasy with character you won't care if they die, but maybe I'm just getting bored of the whole thing by now. After the world was destroyed in the final battle of volume 1, that would have been a good ending point. So far volume 2 is not adding anything to the whole story.

- Atom Agency part 2 by Yann and Schwartz: And we're coming to the comics I actually liked a lot. I loved Atom Agency 1 and this one is pretty good as well. Set in the 50s, Atom Vercorian is hired to find Annette "Little Beetle" Scarabo, a WWII ambulance driver (part of the actual historical Rochambelles) who disappeared during the war when she was captured. Meanwhile his father, inspector at the police, is moving heaven and earth to capture a notorious criminal. Sprinkle in some French-Armenian traditions and we get a very busy comic. A bit too much is going on in these pages (as we're not really introduced to various characters that Atom already knows because they are family or friends of family or celebrities), but I'm not holding it too much against the creative team, because it just invites more rereading. The major storyline (finding Little Beetle) seems almost unimportant in all the things Atom has going on, but I love to read about the Rochambelles, Turkish-Armenian prejudices among immigrants in France and much more.

- Une aventure de Spirou par... Pacific Palace by Christian Durieux. I included a scan of the cover, because it may be one of my favourits for its use of colour (the watermark is from the website), just a field of blue with a red figure as contrast:
imgur.com/0AA8vBi

Spirou has helped his friend Fantasio, who has been unemployed ever since the newspaper he was working for closed down, get a job as a bellhop at the hotel he's been working, the titular Pacific Palace. The hotel is on lockdown though as very special guest will be staying there for the next few days: a disposed dictator with his wife, daughter and a bunch of bodyguards. The staff of the hotel has been thinned to a skeleton crew: the manager, the cook, one maid and the two bellhops. Nobody else is allowed in or near the hotel. I don't think I've read any works by Christian Durieuz before, but this makes me search out more. The art is the main draw: large, page filling drawings of the almost desolate hotel, showing the loneliness and isolation of the various characters. I appreciate Fantasio getting to take a moral stand here for a change instead of Spirou; while he's terrible at being a bellhop (and his journalistic instincts are too strong not to spy on the dictator and his family), he does refuse any tips and protests that they should not be serving somebody like the dictator. The manager and Spirou take a more neutral approach; the hotel is the hotel and guests are guests, they are not there to judge, but as the story progresses, you see that that they don't seem to believe in that attitude themselves. I think this is another high-point in a series that has been very impressive so far.

- O burlão nas Índias by Alain Ayroles and Juanjo Guarnido. I don't speak Portugese (I believe?), so I have to trust google translate and the translation of the title should be something along the lines of The Swindler of the Indies? The dutch translation is more free with its title, so was no help here. Anyway this is a sequel to a book from 1626 (how's that for unreliable release schedules, wednesday warriors?). The book in question is El Buscón or with its full title Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños (wikipedia translation: History of the life of the Swindler, called Don Pablos, model for hobos and mirror of misers) This comic also has a long subtitle:

imgur.com/a/aPiekGt

It's told in the style of the novel, a picaresque novel of a small time criminal who has fled to the Indies (aka America) in the late 16th/early 17th century. The presentation so far has been great: it's a large, thick book with a beautiful cover, a reproduction of an old map of the West Indies inside and the artwork is both detailed and cartoonish. As said I haven't finished it yet, it's a dense read, but one early scene sets up our main character perfectly: Don Pablos has been tossed overboard and picked up by a slaveship, where the slaves have taken control in a mutiny. Originally only seen as a way for them to learn how to use the firearms their guards had, Pablos becomes part of the society as the settle on land. Even though he's lazy and useless, he amuses the former slaves, so the de-facto leader explains to him that he can be part of their society, a society without money and needs, where everybody is equal. At night Pablo contemplates this and runs away, because while he would like to be without needs, a society where there is no opportunity to become rich is not one he would like to live in.