Beautiful Darkness 
 (Spoilers Ahead.) 
 Vehlmann and Kerascoet have created a fully-painted, sugar-coated nightmare. It's an anti-fable, reminding us that underneath the beauty, life is pointless, brutal and absurd. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it's my kind of fun. People seem fairly split on the merits of 'Beautiful Darkness', which is to be expected. There's no real moral to this story, no shiny little wisdom you'll want to save or pass on to the kids. In fact, it's probably best you keep your kids away from this poisonous little wonder... unless they've been boring lately, and you think lightly traumatizing them might help. There's a nihilistic singularity where the heart of this tale should be. It's got no helpful or instructive lessons, but there's truth in every panel. The kind of truth that Prozac and heroin were made for. 
 As the corpse of a young girl decomposes, a group of tiny refugees flee her rotting brain. They are the fragments, figments and facets of the young girl's personality; they are the complex, conflicting and still-evolving qualities that once added up to a child named Aurora. Watching these fragile and miniscule creatures struggle to survive in their deceptively dangerous new woodland home, standing in for the world in general, has painful allegorical associations. Watching these characters die, we are seeing the child die... from an angle our eyes struggle to make sense of. But how they came to be, who the dead girl is and what happened to her -- these are questions Vehlmann leaves unanswered. Instead, he follows the increasingly desperate fate of these delicate, not-so innocent characters. The protagonist shares a name with the dead girl - Aurora - and might be the most fully-developed facet of her personality. Unlike her fickle, self-absorbed boyfriend - Hector - Aurora has a nascent conscience. She takes the initiative, providing some of her idiotic and often helpless friends with food and shelter. But most of these ungrateful little freaks are borderline psychopaths, beneath their adorable facade; particularly the selfish, mercurial Plim, and the cruel, devious 'Princess' Zelie. The sweeter and gentler kidlings die off quick. Scissor-wielding Jane is the exception; clever and diffident, she wants nothing to do with the rest. She's the closest thing to an adult in this tale, with the exception of the enigmatic 'Giant'. His ramshackle cabin seems to be just a short hike from the body... and that's judged from the perspective of characters with two-inch-long legs. He appears to be a recluse who enjoys tinkering with scrap machinery, and the only reason for suspecting him is proximity. We learn he kills his own dinner, meaning he wanders the forest daily hunting game; so how could he have failed to stumble onto the girl? How could he fail to notice the smell? Perhaps he did find her body, but fear of being blamed and/or fear of having to face people again led him to ignore the discovery. 
 The disturbing convocation of maggots and flies and beetles eventually turns the body to bones. As autumn closes in on winter, the games become savage and mean. Aurora's attempt to throw a party with the kidlings and their woodland 'friends' has disastrous results; most of her pals don't show up, and the ones that do get carried off and eaten when the beasts turn beastly. Getting stood up by her obnoxious peers and pissed on by a rude hedgehog leaves Aurora disillusioned with the world, and her kindly spirit is crushed when the malevolent 'Princess' Zelie steals her boyfriend, making Hector her 'Prince'. Aurora gives in to her anger, taking it out on a dapper mouse undeserving of such treatment. She leaves the surviving members of the fucked-up little corpse community behind, and finds a home with Jane in the Giant's cabin. The ending is suitably bitter; there's no resolution for the 'real' Aurora, no answers regarding the Giant's identity or whether he was involved in her death. For Vehlmann and Kerascoet, it's irrelevant, and the dead girl becomes a setting, somewhere between landscape and architecture. The last violent ignition is strangely satisfying, however, wrapping this gorgeously toxic package up with a melancholic ribbon. 
 Fabien Vehlmann is hard to pin down and label as a writer. From 'Seven Psychopaths', his 'Dirty Dozen'-type WWII thriller with Sean Phillips, to his collaboration with Norwegian cartoonist Jason -- 'Isle of 100 000 Graves' -- and now 'Beautiful Darkness', with the two-person artistic entity known as 'Kerascoet', he's kind of all over the place. In a good way, from what I've seen, although admittedly, that's not a lot. As much as I love Jason's artwork, 'Beautiful Darkness' is definitely Vehlmann's best story to date... like an episode of Fraggle Rock directed by David Lynch. Or a Smurfs album scripted by Garth Ennis. But better than either of those things. While Vehlmann's story deserves some kind of cookie or cake reward, it's Kerascoet who deserves most of the credit. If it weren't for the gorgeously macabre cover, the vibrant watercolor pages give the impression of a children's book. But once you start reading, the ugliness beneath the leaves suddenly becomes clear. 
 From the back cover: "(...) Join princess Aurora and her friends as they journey to civilization's heart of darkness in a bleak allegory about surviving the human experience." Seriously? Come on... no one survives the human experience. 
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