One Coin Reads 8: Herakles Book 1, by Edouard Cour

Herakles Book 1, by Edouard Cour

2018

This is exactly why I buy discount comics. The number of books which fall through the cracks in the market is beyond count. This was ¥525 and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the last few months, I've bought a few books from Lion Forge, enough that I was curious about their publication history. A quick wikipedia search reveals that they aren't that interesting as a publisher. Like Dynamite, IDW and a few other start up publishers, they copied the Dark Horse model and secured some licenses to guarantee an audience, and made a publishing line from there. I understand the importance of licensed properties to get kids reading comics, as I enjoyed Marvel's Star Wars comics in the early 80's. As a comic reader, they aren't interesting whatsoever, except in the odd case where an idiosyncratic creator wants to make a book as opposed to merely get paid to make one, like with Tom Scioli's nutty Transformers Vs G.I.Joe book.

So why have I been buying Lion Forge books? They bought out a publisher, Magnetic Press, a few years ago and made it a sub-brand, Magnetic Collection. They publish international comics in English. While more international work than ever is getting an English release, there still seems to be mountains of work yet to be translated. This stuff is really interesting to me, I want to see more of what is being done around the world.

So with this book Herakles, I'm hearing of Edouard Cour's name for the first time. It was first published in 2012, when Cour was in his mid-20s. This is a great early career piece of work.

Once you get used to the stylized illustration, it's very easy to sink in to

Cour is writing and drawing with an animator's eye. It's a book which would take effort not to read, with the images on each page coming alive. He has a strong design sense as well. At a glance, the stylization of Herakles was a little off-putting for a few pages, but pretty quickly it simply becomes the aesthetic of the book and is unnoticeable.

Herakles chases the Ceryneian Hind around the world for a year, eating as he goes. The book isn't a comedy, but it has a mixture of light and dark tones

Graphically, the pages are bold. I'm not sure what he's using to draw. It might just be pencils straight to scans and then colored. His website shows a deluxe black and white edition of the books, and it looks like pencils. However he's doing it, his pages have a nice texture and depth thanks to his technique.

He works in silhouette a lot, and one of the great motifs of the book is the dead and the gods appearing in the world in shadow. When the design is already strong, silhouettes can take it to the next level.

Side by side the black and white and colored editions

I don't have any strong criticisms of the book. It's part one of three, telling of the 12 challenges Herakles undertook in myth. It's a story I'm familiar with, but don't know well. It's great subject matter. Ultimately, this would be easiest to sell as an all ages book, but in a few places Herakles gets full frontal naked. I would let my kid read it, but it's a decision that Cour and his publisher have made that goes against publishing rules in the States. Likely in France, it's not a big deal. But without that minor thing, the book would be an easy purchase for any elementary school library in America.

Herakles speaks to Apollo and Athena

I enjoyed this a lot, and I'm tempted to buy the next two books, except that they aren't readily purchasable in Japan. It's a timeless tale, and these books will age well.