The mysterious cities

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The mysterious cities (in the French original Les Cités obscures ) is the name of a multi-award-winning comic series by the illustrator François Schuiten and the comic scenario artist Benoît Peeters .

Content and style

Similar to the French comic series by Marc-Antoine Mathieu around the ministerial official Julius Corentin Acquefacques , the content of the albums of the Mysterious Cities mostly deals with the intrusion of a surreal appearance into the everyday life of a protagonist . In Der Schattenmann ( L'Ombre d'un Homme , 1999), for example, a man discovers that his shadow has become colored, while in The Urban Planner's Fever ( Fièvre d'Urbicande , 1985) a gray shade suddenly appears on an architect's desk Cube keeps expanding and inexorably.

A common feature of the mostly loosely connected albums is the backdrop for the plot, namely a fictional planet whose surface is populated by largely self-sufficient city - states , each of which has developed its own civilizations, to which an independent architectural style corresponds. The city ​​planners , alias Urbitekten , who often seem to take on the function of historical city founders, take on their task of creating an organically interlocking, coherent and at the same time original living space, in the social and cultural reality as well as the political conditions with the respective Architecture correspond, very seriously; At the same time, it is not clear whether the urban planners were inspired by these existing conditions or whether they also created the entire social structure, way of life and politics of their city themselves on the drawing board. Another theme in the series are accentuated, inflated bureaucracies and hierarchies, which in a Kafkaesque way seem to dominate people rather than the other way around, similar to the way architecture seems to subjugate people rather than invite them to relaxed living, living and working.

The drawings of The Mysterious Cities are typical of Schuiten's style: His clear and distinct lines show his affiliation with the ligne claire . The strong influence of architecture on his work is reflected in the architectural styles of the cities, which are characterized by Art Deco , Art Nouveau and the gigantic style of the rococo architect and painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi .

Clothing and technology from the 19th and early 20th centuries ( zeppelins , iron railway bridges ) are characteristic of almost all cities . Typically for the literary genre of steampunk , these stylistic devices of Victorian and Wilhelmine clothing, language, technology and technical optimism are combined with futuristic techniques and utopian or dystopian alternative worlds and histories; Steam power and mechanical clockwork are often used in a technology that only later became a reality with electricity, whereas the use of electricity itself is still quite rare, apart from the occasional use of telegraphs, for example, and electricity as a utopian energy of the future has similar mystical healing powers as assigned to atomic energy in the middle of the 20th century.

The mysterious cities as a parallel world

The world of mysterious cities is designed as an alternative to earth. Through travel guides such as Le Guide des cités (1996) and a history of the city newspaper called L'Écho des Cités (1993), audio carriers (as in 1990 for Le Musée A. Desombres ) and DVDs (2002 for L'affaire Desombres ) give Schuiten and Peeters give her creations a semblance of reality. The fact that their world is invisible to us is explained by the fact that, when viewed from earth, it is on the other side of the sun.

In the comics there are still possibilities to travel back and forth between the two worlds, namely so-called portals (a traveler who keeps appearing is Jules Verne , for example ), which are mostly located in similar or identical buildings on both planets.

On the Internet, on sites like Tram 81 and Office of the Obscure Passages , Schuiten and Peeters blur fiction and reality by presenting many alleged testimonials, often illustrated with photos and drawings, of people who accidentally briefly entered the world of the Mysterious cities , or have been looking for portals for years. The portal seekers to the world of Cités obscures , in French or English so-called obscurantist (e) s ( cf.Darkman letters , Latin Epistolae obscurorum virorum , from which the term obscurant developed as a backward-looking enemy of the Enlightenment), concentrate on buildings, which correspond to the architectural style of certain city-states of the mysterious cities , which increases the possibility that there could be a portal that connects our world with the respective city-state.

reception

The volumes of the comic series were mostly reviewed individually by literary critics ; the complete work can be found in comic magazines and the volume Schuiten & Peeters: Autour des Cités Obscures . In the individual discussions, Schuiten's drawings are described as "oppressively beautiful" and parallels are drawn with the stories of Franz Kafka and the novels of Umberto Eco . One reviewer asked whether the works “could be used as an occasion for discussions about current problems of architecture and urban development, or whether they would not rather open up spaces of escape in a play of quotes that was postmodern.”

Awards

expenditure

Since 1983, 18 comics and books have been published in the Mysterious Cities series, published in France, Belgium and the Netherlands by Casterman, in Germany by Egmont Ehapa Verlag (in the Feest series of the former Reiner Feest Verlag , acquired in 1991 , in Egmont -Manga - & - Anime series, as well as under the simple abbreviations Ehapa , Egmont and Egmont Ehapa ) and have recently been published by Schreiber & Leser . The individual editions of a volume can differ, sometimes considerably, as the authors often revise stories for new editions graphically and sometimes even change the plot (e.g. by changing the ending sequences).

  • Les murailles de Samaris (1983), German: The walls of Samaris (1st edition Feest 1990; 2nd edition Feest 1992; 3rd edition Egmont Manga & Anime 1992; 4th edition Feest 2007)
  • La fièvre d'Urbicande (1985), German: The urban planner's fever (1st edition Feest 1989; 2nd edition Ehapa 1991)
  • Regis de Brok (= Thierry Smolderen), Francois Schuiten: Le Mystère d'Urbicande (1985) German: The secret of Urbicande (bound booklet A4 - format, publisher / year not specified - probably an attachment to another volume.)
  • L'archiviste (1987), German: The archivist (large-format picture book without words; 1st edition Feest 1990; 2nd edition Egmont Ehapa 2002)
  • La Tour (1987), German: The Tower - The true story of the man who traveled through it (1st edition Ehapa 1991; 2nd edition Ehapa 2000)
  • La route d'Armilia (1988), German: The way to Armilia (1st edition Feest 1992; 2nd edition Feest 1992, luxury edition)
  • L'Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir (1988), German manual of the present and future means of transport (only published in German as an appendix to the luxury edition of Der Weg nach Armilia )
  • Le Musée A. Desombres (1990) (book with audio CD)
  • Brüsel (1992), German: Brüsel (1st edition Ehapa 1992; 2nd edition Ehapa 1993; 3rd edition Ehapa Manga & Anime 1995, special edition; 4th edition Egmont Ehapa 2002)
  • L'Écho des cités (1993), German: Das Stadtecho - The story of a newspaper (1st edition 1994 Ehapa; 2nd edition Ehapa Manga & Anime 2001)
  • Le Guide des cités (1996), German: Guide through the mysterious cities (illustrated book; 1st edition Ehapa 1997; 2nd edition Ehapa Comic Collection 2001)
  • L'enfant penchée (1996), German: Mary (1st edition Ehapa Manga & Anime 1996, special edition; 2nd edition Egmont Ehapa 2001), based on the 1995 children's book Mary la penchée , which was not originally related to the series
  • L'ombre d'un homme (1999), German: Der Schattenmann (1st edition Feest 2000; 2nd edition Egmont Ehapa 2000; 3rd edition Egmont Ehapa 2002) or Licht und Schatten (1st edition Schreiber & Reader 2016)
  • La frontière invisible , Part 1 (2002), German Beyond the Border 01 (1st edition Schreiber & Reader 2002; 2nd edition Schreiber & Reader 2004)
  • L'affaire Desombres (2002) (Book with DVD)
  • Les portes du possible (2005)
  • La frontière invisible , part 2 (2006), German: Beyond the border 02 (1st edition Schreiber & Reader 2007)
  • La Théorie du grain de sable (2007), German: The Grain Theory (1st edition Schreiber & Reader 2010)
  • Revoir Paris , part 1/2 (2014/2016), German: To Paris (writers & readers 2015/2017)

There is also a rather loose connection with the film Taxandria by the Belgian director Raoul Servais (with Armin Mueller-Stahl among others ) from 1994, in which Peeters worked as a set designer. The city-state of Taxandria, which is no longer on the planet of the Mysterious Cities long ago due to a failed physics experiment, is occasionally mentioned in the stories of Schuiten and Peeters when characters refer to the missing Taxandria.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reddition (issue 32, 1998) and RRAAH! (Issue 11, 1990). as well as Comic.de about Schuiten ( Memento of the original from May 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.comic.de
  2. ↑ Review of guides through the mysterious cities on time online
  3. ↑ Literaturkritik.de on Schuiten
  4. ↑ Article on the exhibition “The Construction Principle - The Urban Opposite Worlds by François Schuiten” at the Erlangen Comic Salon 2002 ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.comic-salon.de
  5. ↑ cf. Epilogue to light and shadow (L'ombre d'un homme) 1st edition writer and reader 2016

swell

literature

  • Michel Jans and Jean-François Douvry (eds.), Schuiten & Peeters: Autour des Cités Obscures . Mosquito, 1994.
  • Frank Leinen, "Medial combinatorics, transgressions and authentication strategies in L'enfant penchée and L'affaire Desombres (François Schuiten / Benoît Peeters)", in: Roger Lüdeke [ed.], Communication in the popular. Interdisciplinary perspectives on a holistic phenomenon . Bielefeld: Transcript 2011, pp. 233-255.

Web links

Official website of Schuiten & Peeters

Secondary sources