Frnk v4: “The Eruption” – The Finale of the First Cycle

The first cycle of “FRNK” ends in dramatic fashion. If you thought the surprises and the emotions from the last volume were strong, wait until you see what Olivier Bocquet and Brice Cossu have up their sleeves for this volume!

Previously in the World of “FRNK”

First:

Then this happened:

Followed by this one:

Now, we have:

Frank v4: “The Eruption”

Frank is Our Protagonist

Frank is, obviously, the main character. He gets the most attention. He has the story arc. Everyone else acts in service to that.

And that’s OK.

The cast of supporting characters in the book is mostly two-dimensional. They make for great comedy and have simple personalities, but that’s OK, too. They’re still charming and endearing in their own ways.

I mean, The Smurfs could all be recognized by their adjectival names. Nobody ever complained that the point of The Smurfs wasn’t that Grouchy would find his happy place or that Brainy Smurf would one day learn that people don’t want to be talked down to.

No, the comedy came out of the characters, and the characters were pretty obvious in how they set the jokes up. Throw any two into a situation where their basic natures could cause conflict and you had a story.

The True Meaning of FRNK

The purpose of the cave family here is to help Frank explore who he is and what he wants.

As I’ve said in these reviews before, this isn’t a book about a whiney teenager who’s moping around all day that he can’t Snapchat with his friends or take a selfie to show the world. There are those brief moments, naturally, but the story moves him forward.

He has to learn to accept his new crew — his new family. For a foster child whose last action in his own timeline was to run away from a new foster family, this is pretty important.

He’s learning from them as much as they’re learning from him.

We Forget What We Know

His biggest frustration comes from the huge divide between his own knowledge set and theirs. Sure, they know how to hunt and cook and maintain a campsite, but he knows tens of thousands of years’ worth of more things.

This fourth volume, in particular, is all about his frustrations in getting his point across. The knowledge he takes for granted that he thinks is pretty basic is leagues beyond what the cave people are even capable of understanding. There’s the conflict which causes plenty of comedy and drama.

Specifically, the volcano that the crew is living in is in the process of exploding. New lava flows stream through their living area. The ground shakes and rumbles. Fiery boulders fly through the air.

Careful readers may remember the final panel from volume 2:

“Now that we’ve got fire, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Bocquet and Cossu knew where they were going with this all along…

The cave people are excited by the lava: It warms them up and gives them an easy way to cook their food. Frank is off to the side jumping up and down, waving his arms, and shouting at them that they need to move. This is not good. This is life-threatening, and their lives won’t win this one.

They don’t understand.

Frank likely knows of Pompeii or Mount St. Helens or plenty of other famous instances of volcanos wiping out towns when they explode. All of that stuff hasn’t happened yet in this past time frame. How could he possibly hope to explain them, then?

Heck, science is “new.”  They only have experiences, and not the theory.

They need to see it to believe it, and to experience it to learn from it.  This volcano will give them plenty of that…

The Subplot

In and amongst all of this, baby Gargoyle is learning to walk.  As happens with small children who suddenly find themselves mobile, he wanders off when he spies a fuzzy rabbit, only to get captured by our red-headed frenemies from earlier books.

There’s some debate internally about what to do with the baby — do they really want to risk the wrath of the baby’s true family?

Gargoyle makes the decision a little simpler by being a royal pain in the keister.

But how can they return the baby without getting in trouble?

It’s a nice way to bring all the characters back together again, while giving Gargoyle a little more personality.  It’s also very funny.

Amongst all the drama of the volcano blowing up and the cast’s inevitable doom, it’s nice that they can make room for a silly yet wonderful sequence of gags like this.  Best of all, it’s leading up to something unexpected…

The Art of Cossu and Guillo

I love the look of this book.  It blends in some obvious manga influences along with classic Franco-Belgian storytelling.  Storytelling is clear and consistent, with well-animated and expressive characters.  Frank is designed particularly well.  Cossu can pull any emotion out of his face. It’s deceptively simple, but whether the character needs to look scared, alarmed, shocked, lost, or confused, he can get it clearly.  He uses the manga influenced part of his art to go over the top in a believable way.

His panel layouts are great.  I particularly like the variety of choices he makes in staging action scenes.  He can break a single background down across three panels and have the characters race across them, or he can repeat the same panel three times, and just show the character in action through them. Whatever works best for the moment, he can pull off.

Likewise, in the bigger moments, he can disrupt the flow of panels even more.  When the volcano erupts, he spreads the image across two pages.  It’s not quite a double page splash, though, as he has symmetrical panels telling the story on the far sides of both pages.

Guillo’s colors are a large part of the reason this book looks as good as it does.  He keeps the colors clear and vibrant.  They never fight with the line art.  In simpler scenes, the earth tone colors keep the pages looking wide open and easy to read.  In the more dramatic moments, he can quickly ramp up the colors and their saturation to provide a sense to the reader that something is happening here.

Overall, it’s just a very pretty book, and one that’s very easy to read.

Recommended?

Yes!  This is a series that started off slow. I remember in my first review thinking that it was paint-by-numbers and trying to get things started by just plugging stock characters into a crazy situation and letting things settle in safe ways.

As the series continued, though, it developed its own charming sense of humor and slightly warped perspective on the world.  The man out of time trope didn’t turn into the “chosen one” cliche, nor did Frank turn out to be an unlovable teenager obsessed modern things. His aggravations with living in the stone age are believable and relatable.

The third and now fourth volumes turn on fairly emotional moments near their endings.  The story of “FRNK” is good for more than just light laughs and fish-out-of-water silliness.  There’s genuine heart and emotion here.

If this book was produced in America, Scholastic might publish it, and it might sell a million copies.

This cycle is complete, but I do look forward to seeing more in the future.  Thankfully, acccording to this great interview with Cossu, the second cycle could start as soon as Spring 2019, with the plans being for four books to be published inside of two years.

— 2018.091 —

Buy It Now

Bonus Panel

And so a running gag is born!