This is the first instalment of one of the central masterpieces of the Franco-Belgian comic tradition - a series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters known as the Cités obscures.

The Great Walls of Samaris

Science Fiction & Fantasy

SCHUITEN, François

Peeters

Fantasy

Nbm Pub Co

Eugen Robick designs the perfect city until a foreign element invades, a grid of beams which grows to gigantic proportions, throwing all well-laid plans into disarray but somehow making everyone realize the errors of their ways...

Fever in Urbicand (Cities of the Fantastic)

PEETERS, Benoît

From Booklist\nIn the 1980s, Francois Schuiten collaborated with his brother, Luc, who had introduced him to comics in his childhood, on a graphic-novel trilogy set on hollow planets that contain different societies on concentric outer surfaces. Upper- and lower-level societies interact only accidentally, as when an upper-level inhabitant breaks through her world's floor and the lower level's ceiling in part two, "Zara," although winged humanoids, separate from all wingless societies, travel between planets as well as levels, at least in part one,"Carapace." The six stories of "Carapace" and the single stories "Zara" and "Nogegon" are all concerned with sexual desire, because Francois draws slender young women so beautifully as well as because there is strict sexual segregation on some planets. Francois' delight in architecture, perspective, and flight is also highly evident. While the long stories are in Francois' technically impeccably drawn comics style, those of "Carapace" show him experimenting with softer delineation and painterly color effects. If Dali had done comics, they may have looked like this. Exquisite. Ray Olson 
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nA bicyclist on a glass road has trouble not dissolving into a series of cubes. A woman finds an upside-down world beneath the world she lives in. While looking for her, her best friend visits a world of men who live according to an unbreakable law of symmetry. The narrative threads of the various SF stories collected here arent always easy to follow, but theres no doubt the authors have some mad ideas worthy of Alan Moore or Grant Morrison at their trippiest, combined with an emphasis on the sexual practices of these worlds that will remind some of Barbarella. While the writing (or maybe the translation) isnt always up to conveying the more outrageous concepts that the Schuiten brothers have dreamed up, fortunately the art is. Françoiss lines and colors are always clear, even when depicting surreal concepts like "sculptraces" (sculptures that look like rotoscoped motion), or the disintegration of some characters into their component geometric shapes. The coloring is a little muddy, seemingly a result of reducing the original album-sized works to trade paperback size for the American market, but it does not affect the clarity of the storytelling at all. Most importantly, this work gives the sense of an alien but fully realized and internally consistent world, offering dazzling and original visuals, even if the interest in bare-breasted young women occasionally overwhelms the SF concepts. 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Hollow Grounds

Comics & Graphic Novels

SCHUITEN, LUC

Graphic Novels

Wildstorm

Mr. Abeels runs a flower shop about to enter modernity: imagine, through the miracle of plastics, flowers that never fade! His novelty is snatched up by the ambitious city planners of an all-new Brusel. No more lack of hygiene! No more dusty old buildings! All is razed and enormous new skyscrapers are erected at blistering speed! Never mind the disruptions and uprootings of people¹s lives! Who needs to preserve and live in history? Hurrah for modernity! Abeels falls in love with a renegade woman who fights the extensive redesigns and ends up having to play both sides carefully... Another retro-SF city, full of classic European elements a la Jules Verne. This world has been so successful in Europe as to elicit a life-size roving exhibition recreating it, even metro stations in Paris and Brussels designed after it!

Cities of the Fantastic: Brusel

Shortly after arriving in the Center for Cartography, where he works to further the expansionist goals of his government, Roland meets a young woman kept by the center, whose body is covered with barely perceptible lines.

Cities of the Fantastic: The Invisible Frontier Vol. 1

Roland, who has gone up the ranks quickly at the Center for Cartography of Sodrovno-Voldachia, cannot feel but a certain unease as to the renewed emphasis on their work brought about by the ambitious new Marshall of their country. And that girl with what seems to be a map on her lower back... The conclusion to this Cities of the Fantastic story.

Cities of the Fantastic: The Invisible Frontier - Vol. 2

NBM Publishing

The art of Francois Schuiten of Cities of the Fantastic fame.

The Book of Schuiten

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Winner of the coveted Gaiman Award as the No. 1 translated foreign comic book series published in Japan in 2013, this story of perseverance and a young girl's search for love has been translated from it's original French into ten languages. Author and publisher Stephen D. Smith has now translated The Leaning Girl into English and it features an introduction by Karen Green, Graphic Novel Librarian at Columbia University. After a freak accident on the Star Express roller coaster, 13 year-old Mary Von Rathen begins to lean. Doctors can not help her, so she is sent by her selfish mother and hen-pecked father to a private school in Sodrovni. Mary escapes and joins the Robertson Circus where she remains for several years, until she hears from newspaper editor, Stanislas Sainclair, that a scientist, Axel Wappendorf, might be able to help her. Wappendorf is working on a rocket to reach a planet that could hold the secret to Mary's trouble. Meanwhile an artist, Augustin Desombres, has run away from the busy world and buys an empty building on the High Plains of Aubrac in the French countryside. He begins painting murals of strange globes. Now as a young woman, Mary decides to join Wappendorf in the rocket. On the alien planet, they discover an area with many globes where she has a chance meeting with the artist. Nominated for two 2015 Eisner Awards: BEST U.S. EDITION OF INTERNATIONAL MATERIAL and BEST PENCILER/INKER - François Schuiten.

The Leaning Girl (Obscure Cities)

IDW Publishing

Part of the Hollow Grounds series. The logic behind the world of the hollow grounds seems familiar to us, but is in fact a vertigibous trap. It becomes a real treat for the attentive reader to let himself slide into these chasms where elegance is just a discreet mask concealing the most terrible weapons: Intelligence.

Nogegon

Humanoids Pub

Product description\nSous-titr "Des Cits obscures la Ville lumire" , runit pour la premire fois les documents indits que Paris a inspir l'artiste. Grands dessins en noir et blanc, peintures l'acrylique, illustrations ralises pour illustrer un indit de Jules Verne, scnographies dessines pour la station Arts et Mtiers ou projets conus pour le Grand Paris, Franois Schuiten nous livre tout son imaginaire, en grand format.\nFrom the Back Cover\nSous-titré «Des Cités obscures à la Ville lumière», réunit pour la première fois les documents inédits que Paris a inspiré à l'artiste. Grands dessins en noir et blanc, peintures à l'acrylique, illustrations réalisées pour illustrer un inédit de Jules Verne, scénographies dessinées pour la station Arts et Métiers ou projets conçus pour le Grand Paris, François Schuiten nous livre tout son imaginaire, en grand format.

Images de François Schuiten: Des Cités obscures à la Ville lumière (French Edition)

Casterman

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