The Hollow Grounds v1: “Carapaces”

Forty years ago, Luc and Francois Schuiten published three books in their “The Hollow Grounds” series. Schuiten was still a student when he started on the project, working with his brother Luc on the stories.

Keep that in mind if you ever come across this book. It’s a prototype for the Schuiten style. He’s very much still experimenting here and looking for what makes him an artist. This book includes pen and ink stories, fully painted stories, and a mix inbetween. There’s even a brief interlude half made up of architectural drawings.

Each of the stories is different but none get you to that peak of what you might think about when it comes to Schuiten’s style. You can definitely see where it’s going, though. The bones of it are here, from the crazy world building to the detailed rendering.

The six stories in this book are thematically linked. They’re all about desire, and how every time a man wants something, things go horribly awry in different ways. And, just to play into that American worldview that European comics are soaked in sex, there’s plenty of that, too. You want full frontal nudity? Strange sci-fi escapades? Armored people surrounded by insects daring to consummate their desires? You got it!

Whether that’s the product of a younger artist sowing his wild oats or just the different way sex is dealt with in France, I couldn’t tell you. But if you don’t like comics about that kind of stuff, you’ve now been warned.

Another warning: The book is too big to fit on my scanner, so I had to take pictures of specific panels and pages to accompany this review. My apologies for ones where straight lines seem to be bowed out, or where shadows or highlights fall and impact the color on the art.

In many ways, the book feels to me like a collection of “Heavy Metal” stories. I’d have to think Schuiten was influenced by the Metal Hurlant folks who had come up in the 1970s, just as Schuiten was working on this book. There are likely other influences I’m not aware of, but that’s the first one that jumps to mind. There’s even some traces of Moebius in here, I’d have to think.

This is a collection of short stories. It feels very much like the same kind of short story collection you might get from a science fiction author. These stories are not all based on the three acts structure. They’re not Hero’s Journeys or Mistaken Identity Man Overcoming Great Obstacles to Beat the Big Bad Guy in the Third Act Spectacular. They’re each a simple story with one real point to them. In a couple of cases, it feels more like the story is there just to attempt to hold some drawings together. The point is the art.

I’ll cover them each next.

I should clarify one point so as not to confuse anyone: This three-part series is not the “Cities of the Fantastic” series that Schuiten did with Benoit Peeters. Hopefully, I’ll get to some of those at another time…

The Stories of “Carapaces”

1. “Shells”

After a page showing the mating cycle of two insects, we meet a metal man and woman. We learn that they are humans inside those metal shells — those carapaces — who must live like that to protect themselves from nature’s elements. But what happens when their needs for each other overwhelm that precaution?

The interesting thing about this story is Schuiten’s art style. It starts in a typical pen and ink style. It feels awkward, like a young artist still deciding what wants to do. These first few pages feel the most like a “typical comic book artist” style as you’ll ever see Schuiten do.

There’s one page, however, that includes a large panel of the character underwater in what looks like a commercial airplane grave. That felts Schuitenesque to me. It combined the humanity of his art with his technical renderings and the sense of depth and dimension he achieves with them.

As the characters pull off their carapaces, we see them as fully painted, natural humans. And then, like the most commercial of short stories, there’s a twist in the end and so goes the story.

I’m impressed by how the young Schuiten uses panels in this story. He’s got a bunch of story he wants to fit into these eight pages, so he goes for the full 12 panel page layouts a couple of times. During the “argument” between the two characters, Schuiten gets more experimental, with little slivers of panels going back and forth, and all the lettering down the middle of the page for the dialogue. And, of course, he mixes his art styles to help best show what’s going on in the story with the metamorphosing character.

It’s a good start to the book. The art starts a little shaky, then finds it footing. The story knows where it’s going, and the ending feels like a proper short story ending. It’s a bit icky with all the insects, but it’s a solid sci-fi short with a limited cast, a big idea, and an ending that, if it isn’t a twist, at least includes a pay-off that is well earned..

2. “Stampede”

This is the most “Art School Student Doing Salvador Dali” story of the lot. Coming in at eight pages, it deftly mixes Schuiten’s propensity towards drawing fascinating architecture and dimensional scenes. The story then uses Schuiten’s skills to make the whole point of his story rest on visual cues.

Schuiten does go to town on this one, featuring a man on a bicycle riding through town to meet up with his girlfriend. They have a fight over his lack of self-control. And then he shows he has control and loses it all.

It’s a sleight story, but it’s a visual delight. First of all, the character design for the bike rider is like something out of a trippy experimental 70s comic. It’s all about a man who can change into a cubist body. But before the story gets to that point, there’s a leisurely examination of the landscapes, with trees that line a path while floating in the sky, a city with a skybound bike path, and a world that’s built up, giving us a ridiculously low angle to view everything from. It looks like the town sits on a big sheet of plexiglass, and the cameramen are under there, pointing their cameras up and seeing the world from a unique perspective.

Like much of the work in this book, it feels like it’s based on creating amazing visuals and coming up with a story to justify using them. There are bigger themes, you might argue, that the visual trick of this story is trying to tell. I don’t know about that — I think Schuiten maybe just wanted to draw this cool effect. For modern readers, it’s downright Quitely-eque..

I enjoyed this one. As slight as the story was, this is where Schuiten starts to show his gifts on the page.

3. “Crevice”

Newlyweds are separated when a crack in the planet swallows the woman up, where she is taken by the, uhm, mechanical creature that runs the planet for purposes that are more than a bit icky, and….

This is not a story that would fly today. Honestly, it wasn’t even that good for 1980, though I give it credit for its structure and painted artwork. It also deserves credit for its focus. The story moves fast, with nothing holding it down and no tangents to diverge onto.

Schuiten’s version of the underground world is spectacular. When the action moves from the bucolic countryside above ground to the more mechanized underground, the comic starts to get interesting.

The back half of the story doesn’t rely on his detailed technical drawings, but rather on his painted style. It’s a strong style that sells the story.

I’m not a huge fan of the story, but I give him credit where it’s due for its speed and focus.

4. “Sample”

I have no idea what this one is about, or what is even going on. Thankfully, it’s only four pages.

Looks like a warrior on a horse falls off a cliff and is zapped up to a ship. Or something.

I’m all for experimental modes of storytelling and short snippets of tales that convey a single concept. I can account for the differences in European storytelling versus American. I can see the work of a budding creator finding his place in the artistic world and indulging his whims rather than latching on to a strict narrative.

But I still don’t get this one. It goes nowhere.

Moving on…

5. “The Fog Cutter”

This is the centerpiece of the book for me. This is where the high concept meshes best with the characters and something of a plot. It still has that short story taste and feels a bit like a crazy sci-fi story, but I think it’s the strongest and clearest of the tales.

It’s about a man who is carving an enormous statue with the aid of a laser-shooting glove that handles the carving work. He’s Laser Wolverine. From his perch high in the statue sky, he seeks inspiration for his statue from one woman, in particular, who is involved with another man.

But, then the fog rolls in and solidifies. His laser-cutting gloves are the only thing in town that can free the people who find themselves caught in the solid fog. This causes some complications, some of which relate back to the woman he was, uhm, “observing”? “Stalking”? It’s a little gray in that area…

The ending is a clever little twist that uses all the parts of the story that had been set up to that point. It even includes a near-splash page with lots of Schuiten detail.

There’s some work left to the reader to get this story done, and reading it a second time helps a bunch. But it’s good stuff, over all.

6. The Flitters

Throughout the book, there are interstitial pages detailing the flights of creatures called “Flitters,” who basically look like humans with wings instead of arms.

The book ends with three pages to wrap up their “story.” It’s not much of one. This segment feels like a collection of pin-ups in search of a narrative. There’s some of Schuiten’s best artistic work of the book on those pages, but in the end I feel like I’ve just read a paragraph of description masquerading as a chapter.

That doesn’t bother me so much, though. These kinds of short story collections are custom made for more experimental stories, as well as simpler and more direct ones. Each contains an idea and skips everything else to get straight to it. There’s no room for bloat.

And, yeah, pretty art. I’ll enjoy that part, at least.

And any excuse to run another big page of Schuiten’s art is a good excuse:

English Editions of the Book

I know of only two.

I’m reviewing the series based on the books published by Humanoids 20 years ago. They are hardcover and at the books’ original, full European album size. It’s a beautiful package.

If I had one complaint about it, though, that would be the lettering. Humanoids, like so many publishers in the late 90s and into the 2000s, thought the Whizbang font was a good idea and used it everywhere.

A few years later, DC Comics had the Humanoids license for a brief spell. They came out with a trade paperback book that collected all three of the “Hollow Grounds” books in this series. It was awful. First, they shrank down Schuiten’s art to standard North American comic book size. That’s a crime that ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. New laws need to be made up just to prosecute DC for that abomination.

Even worse, their printing looked crappy. I remember flipping through it at the comics shop and being shocked at how awful it looked. I knew some lines would get lost in the shrinkage, but the remaining lines all looked bad, too.

So, yes, this is a trilogy that’s only been printed properly in English once, is long out of print, and fetches a multiple of cover price on Amazon or eBay today, used. You can get the trade collecting it for $25 or so, if you’re desperate.

Recommended?

This is really a book for Schuiten completists. It’s fun to see how he started. It’s interesting to see the set-up for the next couple books in the series, both of which are more cohesive narratives. But I couldn’t suggest paying through the nose to get “Carapaces.”

I might make that argument for the third book in the series, “Nogegon,” but we’ll get there eventually…