Cinq Avril v1: “The Heir of da Vinci”

Cinq Avril, an abandoned child, becomes Leonardo Da Vinci’s student and the heir to the great thinker’s legacy. Meanwhile, France wants to incorporate his home region into its kingdom, and the Catholic Church personally finds him evil and scary for believing in such things as science and literature. He must be stopped and his secrets must be contained.

Sword fights, horse chases, and flying arrows follow the boy as he tries to figure out his identity, his ancestry, and his destiny.

Allez!

Dogmatic Credits

What’s Going On?

Cinq Avril was abandoned at the house of the older sister of a future King of France in 1514, where he was raised by a cook there, Marie, as her own.

Leonardi Da Vinci, in his waning years, came to live in the area and takes the boy on as his student, confidant, and heir apparent. In a day and age of the church ruling the world through its dogma, the idea of thinkers, artists, and scientists trading ideas and getting near any level of power was very disturbing and had to be stopped. Da Vinci, with his notebooks filled with flying machines and bicycle designs and the Vitruvian man, was villain #1.

(Hmmm, this is already beginning to sound like the start of the French Revolution, and I can say that as an expert having listened to half an audio book on that topic last year.)

And so, on Avril’s 18th birthday, the Court of the Inquisition shows up to steal him away. They’re too late, though, as Marie and friends have just sent him off on the adventure he’s meant to be on since he was born.

He’s still desperate to find his birth mother, and hopes this journey will result in that meeting. Instead, he finds himself at the center of the rebellion to help the region of Brittany stay independent against the new kingdom of France. Though a slowly eroding position, many Bretons would prefer to keep their independence.

You know, Asterix is set in Brittany. And, yes, there are dolmens and menhirs along the paths that Avril travels.

And, yes, there’s this panel, in which the evil Cardinal Sordi outlines his next campaign to unite all the regions into the French collective:

Is that a direct allusion to Asterix?!? Asterix’s Village is in Armorique, a seaside section in the northern tip of the Brittany region.

Just after 50 B.C., It had a druid and a lot of folks who likely drank mead at banquets…

Could just be a coincidence and an interesting note that history repeats itself and things change at an alarmingly slow pace sometimes.

Maaaybe….

The Chosen One

(This panel reminds me of a recent one I highlighted from “Ekho” v8.)

Avril is a typical The Chosen One character for the sake of this series. He’s an orphan who never knew his parents and so desperately wants to meet his mother, if still possible. Hints are given and others around him hint that they knew who she is, but the truth is held at a distance for some good plot-related reason, I assume. (Not just because the writer has a four-book contract or something like that…)

Avril is a fun character. Trained by Da Vinci and blessed with a strong memory for Da Vinci’s ideas and projects, he’s whip-smart and can pull out an invention to save the day when needed. He’s the 16th century MacGyver, even using a couple of futuristic designs in this book to save the day when necesary.

I can see that being a recurring event in the series — that moment when he stops everything to lay out the science for an invention to fix the immediate problem. It’s done rather well in this book, even incorporating some amphoras, which I originally learned about in the pages of Asterix (yes, him again).

There’s a lot of plot in this book and a lot of groups of people in action. It’s a constant question of who’s mad at who and who is backstabbing who. It’s religious dogma versus science, monks who prefer peace versus villagers who want independence, and a steady stream of people who want to help Avril make it to the next step in his ultimate life story.

But how many of them can you trust? Are their stories too simple, or is that the point to get past that moment and move onto the next segment of the adventure?

If there’s one criticism I have of the book, it’s that it’s very plot-focused. Avril is a pawn in a larger game through most of the book, and neither he nor the reader know how or why. There are people willing to take advantage of that, and truthful answers are not immediately forthcoming.

The swordfights and the horse chases are a pleasant and necessary distraction from the quest for something that seems to change every eight pages. By the end of the book, there’s an ending to this part of the story that easily lends itself to explaining what the structure will be for the next three or four books in the series. I’m looking forward to following his adventures through those lands and with those people.

It might just take a while. This is a new book. We’re going to have to wait 6 or 8 or maybe 12 months before the next volume arrives, I’d guess.

The Art of Monin (with colors by Sedyas)

Noë Monin’s art feels like it would fit into the style you might find in Spirou Journal. Heck, Avril has a bit of Spirou to him with that red bit of hair there.

His style feels very animation-influenced, but his experience doesn’t come from there. He graduated from an arts college, learned from previous comic book greats, and worked in video games, not animation.

But he can draw characters in motion very well. Most artists would shy away from chase scenes or horses, yet Monin handles both at the same time with relative ease:

His storytelling is impeccable and his characters are unique and interesting to look at, each with their own quirk to set them apart — whether it’s a pair of defining glasses, a scar on the face, or that mop of hair piled high on the head. Characters are dressed period appropriately, as far as I can tell, with all the detail that you need for that.

On top of all that, Sedyas does his usual great job on the coloring, fading out colors and linework in the background when appropriate, but not as a matter of religious coloring dogma. He concentrates on showing the line art clearly and not showing off with murky colors to make anything look more “serious” than it needs to be.

Even his nighttime scenes are well lit. You know it’s nighttime, but everyone is crystal clear and bright on the page. You can do a lot with the proper palette of light blue colors.

A lot of his coloring is “literal.” He’s not color-keying every scene or adding some strong color blocks to imply colors. He’s coloring stuff as it would be seen in the real world, without making everything feel literal. Yes, the sky is blue and the grass is green, but it never feels like a coloring book. Everything blends in together wonderfully.

If his name sounds familiar, it should. Sedyas is the colorist who works on Jose Luis Munuera’s books and does a great job there, too.

A NoTe on the LetteRing

All word balloons are not outlined. That is, there’s no black line forming the shape of the balloon and the tail. It works well here since the coloring is strong enough to make the balloon shapes obvious. I like the tails, in particular, and the balloon shapes feel organic.

The font also has that hand-written feel, full of character like it’s based directly on someone’s hand lettering.

It does have one quirk that gets old fast, though. Several letters are double height. Look at the “G”s and the “B”s and the “P”s, in particular, in the word balloon above. It feels random and weird. I wouldn’t say I like it, but I can still l read it, so I’ll let it go.

What This Book Really Needs

I’ve taken a week to write this review, and it’s just now that I’m realizing why. I like the book, but I can’t whole heartedly recommend it. There’s something tha frustrates me here.

It just dawned on me what that is.

It’s too much plot and not enough character. While Avril has a few interesting moments, I don’t know his character outside of what the plot has him doing. That’s mostly careening around France like a pinball, bouncing from contact to contact, pushed to the next nearly unbelievable thing before being diverted elsewhere. And, all the while, everyone around him is lying to him, at least partially.

This book needs a volume 0. I’d love to see more about Avril learning from Da Vinci and meeting Ariane (the sword-fighting girlfriend potential) and becoming his own person. Aside from wanting to know who his mother his and learning an awful lot, what makes him tick? What smaller adventures has he had that prepare him for this big one?

Avril is, at the end of the first book, a bit of a cipher who was unwittingly saved by someone else near the end of the book for reasons he still doesn’t understand, nor do we.

Give us something to grab onto, and we’ll settle better into this book and root for the main character more naturally, not just because we know we’re supposed to.

Recommended?

This comes with a bit of a caveat, but mostly yes. It’s a well-cartooned title that has great promise, though this first book throws a lot at the reader who is unfamiliar with the French monarchy of the 16th century. I enjoyed many of the parts, but the book as a whole is still missing something for me. I’m going to stick with it to the end, though. If nothing else, Monin’s art is worth it.

You can buy the book on Amazon or Izneo right now.