Written by by Geoffroy Monde
Art by Mathieu Burniat
Published by Abrams ComicArts
As a young lad, one of the books I often checked out from the Public Library was the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Not Sir Thomas Mallory’s La Morte De Arthur, but rather a kids’ version, with a lot of the messier parts of the legend cleaned up a bit.
Over the years since, I’ve revisited Arthur through the eyes of Camelot (the movie and the play), Excalibur (the movie), Camelot 3000 (the DC comic book), Monty Python & the Holy Grail, and Peter David’s fun novels of Arthur returning in England’s time of greatest need.
Nothing, however, prepared me in the slightest for a King Arthur such as we find in Fierce.
Luckily, he isn’t the main character this time. Fierce is a 2022 French graphic novel by Geoffroy Monde and Mathieu Burniat, newly translated into English from Abrams ComicArts.
The book’s subtitle, “The F*cked-Up Fairy Tale of a Fed-up Princess,” signals that this is not a kids’ graphic novel, even though the anime-like art style might seem to indicate it is.
The book starts out by showing us the heroic deeds of young Arthur, using a magic sword created for him by Merlin (oddly, not Excalibur) to defeat a horde of demons who arrive through a portal.
Cut to years later, with the bloated, drooling, crazed king in a perpetual alcoholic stupor. We also meet his teenaged daughter Ysabelle, soon to be married off, as promised by her father, to the effete, loathsome, Baron of Cumber. We learn that her older sister had once been promised to the Baron as well, and had actually run off for parts unknown rather than allow a wedding to take place.
Once she meets the Baron, accompanied by his giant, mute, and somewhat simple man-servant, Claude, Ysa begins planning to do the same. This is where things get interesting as it turns out that King Arthur’s sentient magic sword is tired of all the inactivity in the kingdom and seduces Ysa into taking it along on her escape!
From there, we get nearly 200 pages of exciting adventures as Ysa and the sword search for first the missing sister, then the mysterious sorcerer, Merlin, all while attempting to avoid the determined Baron, who vigorously pursues them.
Ysa is orange, Arthur is purple, Claude is blue, the Baron a pasty white. It’s all very stylized. While the artist can, when needed, be subtle and mysterioso, one of Fierce’s greatest assets is its energy level! Page after page, panel after panel, the energy leaps out at the reader from not just the artwork but also the lettering, masterfully manipulating the tensions of the story for maximum impact.
Despite the appearances of a standard quest-type adventure, the story presents us with a number of unexpected twists and turns. For example, one doesn’t often find a brothel in a self-proclaimed fairy tale. The whole book is filled with quiet humor, too, often involving Claude. There’s even some clearly unplanned—considering this as a reprint from a few years back—but surprisingly accurate parallels to the current political situation in the US.
In the end, though, it’s another plucky young heroine who wins our hearts and gives us a buy-in to the plot. Once Ysa sets her mind to something she wants to do—or refuses to do—you just know she’ll succeed!
A little bit of cartoon nudity and bodily fluids underscore that the book’s for an adult audience. After the story’s conclusion and epilogue, we get a number of other artists at the back offering their interpretation of some of the characters or scenes from this somewhat dark, quirky, but delightful book.
Booksteve recommends.
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