They do believe in both, especially Agathe’s twin children Ralph and Raphaëlle who have an unhealthy interest in spiritualism – communicating with or even reviving dead spirits. No one knows if it is a disease or a curse. The invalid’s medication has proved ineffectual for Charles has been paralysed for fifteen years, his only actions being the brief cessation of his constant drooling for precisely ninety seconds upon awakening. The story storms on at a lightning pace, slicing between scenes in the new priest’s church, its graveyard, the moors where a lone orphan called Alba wanders, and the Malherbe family’s château where Doctor Emile Spitzner is their physician in residence, treating widowed matriarch Agathe’s brother, Charles. They act as if in burlesques, and I’m only half-tempted to qualify that “without the comedy” even though things grow very dark indeed. In the opening ‘Adam Sarlech’ these marionettes, with utterly mad hair, whirl wildly and gesticulate as if undergoing constant electrotherapy. What Bacon achieved with swollen, swirling paint, Bézian commits to paper with line and ink.īoth produced distorted grotesques whose faces protrude and implode in places, no more so here than the servant’s with an eye patch which looks as if it’s being sucked into its socket.

One peak inside this substantial, album-sized oeuvre should be enough to convince anyone that Frédéric Bézian is the Francis Bacon of the comic world. Adam Sarlech Trilogy h/c (£25-99, Humanoids) by Frédéric Bézian.

Art Ops, Vol. 2 by Shaun Simon