The Hollow Grounds v2: “Zara”

Think of “Y The Last Man,” except a group of men from another planet show up and the woman use the one man they have merely for reproductive means with quite some ceremony. It’s Colonialists meet Amazons! Sort of.

In the five years between “Carapaces” and “Zara,” Schuiten came a long way. He’s landed on a style. He learned some storytelling chops. His art added dimension and detail. Yet, his architectural obsessions on the comics page are only just beginning….

If the first volume of this trilogy was Schuiten’s college project, then this is his more professional moment in world building and storytelling.

It’s not perfect, but it is a beautiful book, and the story — as strange as it can be — is mostly cohesive.

Credits Floating Down the Abyss

What’s Going On?

Opening Salvo

The book starts with a short story. It runs twelve pages and introduces us to young Daisy, whose community never stops walking. Her town is constantly on the move. She wonders why they almost never stop and why they need a three day head start for when they do take a break.

One day, she stays behind and watches what happens to her world when she stops. Within a few days, she realizes what’s going on — they’re walking to stay ahead of the spinning world!

It’s a high concept science-fiction story of discovery and wonder. It’s a strong story, and one that would fit in well with the short story collection that was the first volume of The Hollow Grounds series, “Carapace.”

Schuiten’s art is the star of it, though. It’s a black and white tale done in meticulous, detailed pen and ink. A large chunk of the second half is done in a ridiculously busy, detailed style that resembles wood etching. Here’s another look at it:

There are times when it feels like the art details overwhelm the storytelling. In fact, there’s a feeling I had throughout the whole book that Schuiten is a far better illustrator and graphic designer than he is a comic book artist. There are smaller storytelling moments where he made minor mistakes that jumped out at me, usually dealing with continuity or clarity.

It probably helps to explain why so much of the dialogue feels expository in the book — it has to carry the art through the story. As with everything in life, it’s a trade-off. In this case, the reader can easily forgive some exposition in return for some of the amazing imagery in the book.

This story is merely the prelude to the main story. Daisy is about to become the inciting incident to something much bigger….

The Main Story

The rest of the book is done in painted color over black linework. Daisy ventures to the inner layer of her homeworld of Zara, where a civilization of women live in isolation. They do work in digging some trenches in the walls, and live a very vertical life style. It’s something that, smartly, Schuiten’s panel shapes often reflect.

There we meet Nelle, who becomes our point of view character to explain the situation to the new woman who just amazingly landed underground.

The women of this society perpetuate their community with some kind of strange ceremony/procedure wherein they are impregnated by a giant blob of a man in a bright shaft of sunlight, a precious commodity in this underground world.

Daisy is disruptive to this underground civilization, which has been on its own for so long that they’ve forgotten what men look like. But Daisy can show them the way back out, to a world where men still exist! The locals become obsessed with the, uhm, “vine” that’s naturally attached to a man that they don’t have.

It’s that weird kind of sex-obsessed science-fiction that, again, feels very “Heavy Metal” to me. (Schuiten had some of his earliest work published in the very early days of “Heavy Metal,” after debuting in Asterix’s home magazine, “Pilote.”) It’s not the clean sleek metallic Star Trek or other space ship franchise of the day. This is down and dirty, fantastic and, er, freaky.

The center of the story revolves around how the women continue their species, and how this new invader might be very helpful to them. To my eyes, there’s a light-hearted take on gender dynamics in the book. There are great comedic moments of the women thinking about or speculating on what “men” actually are and what they do. But there’s still a darker background of the need for any community to perpetuate at any cost.

That’s when a group of men from another planet, dressed in medieval gear, zap down onto the planet to subjugate the locals, just because. They like to conquer new worlds and tame their women. These are colonialists who just want to gather up more land, more workers, and more power.

The story quickly morphs into underground Die Hard, as the women use their knowledge of the local environment to their advantage against the invaders who have deadly weapons and even deadlier attitudes. The chase up and down is a lot of fun.

Is It Parody? Exploitation? Social Commentary?

The bad guys are so offensively macho and rapacious that it feels, again to my 2020 eyes, like a parody of the kind of two dimensional villains you see twirling their mustaches before tying hapless women to train tracks.

Of course, the real colonialists weren’t that far off in their attitudes, so in some ways it’s a very realistic depiction of an other-worldly alternate version of Europeans who went around making conquests of locals on other continents before stripping their land and people for all they were worth. Schuiten even draws them to look like medieval warriors. He’s not hiding his influences here. Their talk of a short trip to a nearby planet might as well be a day’s boat ride to an island or another continent. The comparison is obvious there on the page. In this Humanoids translation, it’s even a point made in dialogue that they choose to dress in their medieval war clothes..

Schuiten spends a lot of time exploring the community of women, too. We see how they work, how they live, and how they love. I don’t think it’s exploitative at all. It all feels like a logical progression from the central conceit. Of course they would fall in love with each other and most likely there’d be far less of a taboo about ever being topless. (It’s not their normal wardrobe, but in the midst of battle or in the face of great heat, it happens.) It seems logical that there wouldn’t be the same kind of taboos in a world where everyone is the same like that.

In fact, Schuiten treats the nudity in the book as so mundane and average that it doesn’t at all feel titillating. There’s not a lot of it in the book, but what he does show is very much underplayed. Nobody stops to pose for the reader. Nobody’s thrusting out their hips or pulling back their shoulders. Nobody looks too, er, top heavy and unbelievable.

Topless women are there, though, and that would be enough for some to proclaim this book to be exploitative. It really isn’t.

OK, so maybe the page-long shower scene didn’t need to take up that much space. It wasn’t a wholly unique or plot-relevant scene or anything.

There’s more to it than just that, though, including inclusion of lesbian relationships, which when the book was published in 1985 wouldn’t be a terribly commonplace thing for comics. They’re shown here as normal and natural. Men are more a point of curiosity, not something they’re all in a rush to find.

I just realized this book probably passes the Bechdel Test, too…

From that isolationist perspective, the humor around the male anatomy is played convincingly for laughs, in that wide-eyed way that someone seeing such things without prior reference would find it.

Now, the means of procreation is a bit disturbing and very weird, but Schuiten even includes an explanation for what the inspiration for that is. It all makes sense and even ties back into “Carapaces” in a way, too.

Story Structure

There’s a lot of space in this story given to exploring the world and the ways in which the women live. It’s a fun visual exploration, which might annoy some who want to see the plot move faster or feel more important.

That’s a sticking point to a lot of Schuiten’s work, as I recall. These are often more visual journeys than character studies. Plots drive things, but the plots can get pretty far out there in service to the worlds they live in.

That all said, there are basic storytelling concepts that should still hold true. In “Zara”, those occasionally get overlooked.

The best example I can give is the moment when a major character dies in the battle between the men and women. It’s basically shrugged off without any kind of reaction or consequence. I don’t need other characters to fall apart in reaction to the news or fall into a stupor for pages on end, but there’s barely even an acknowledgement that this awful thing happened. Nothing much is learned from her death that propels them into their next action. They just keep going, as planned.

So what was the point of that death?

The more important part of the story remains Schuiten’s designs for everything from the modes of transportation to the fantastical landscape in which they live, below ground and yet on the edge of a steep chasm.

And, oh boy, is the ending just slightly twisted in a warped and yet delicious way. It’s not quite revenge, though it might feel like that. It’s more just the case of an underground species using everything they can get their hands on to have tools at their disposal for jobs that need to be done.

Print Quality

As with “Carapaces,” I’m reviewing this book from Humanoids’ 2001 print edition. It is a gloriously full album-sized book with a hardcover.

I did, however, notice something about the print quality as I read it. I gave the DC edition a hard time for shrinking the art and losing some of the line quality. This edition doesn’t have those problems, but it does suffer from something not too dissimilar.

The black and white pages at the front of the book are crisp and clear. They’re sharp. They match up evenly with the computer lettering as if everything came from the same pen type.

The color pages, however, suffer a bit. If you’re holding the book at its normal distance from your face, everything looks fine. The colors look like they’re fresh off the canvas. You can see the slight differences in shades pretty easily from where the brush landed to where the colors bleed out to their edges.

Hold the book a little closer, however, and things start to get a little… fuzzier. The black ink work suffers. It’s much fainter, almost a gray. It has to compete with the painted color for attention. It’s all there, but it doesn’t stand out.

There are multiple reasons I could think of for this. The most likely, in my mind, is that this is a book that was shot to film in 1985. This reprint might even come from those original films. We didn’t have laser-like certainty in our scans back then. It wasn’t a perfect process.

Reading this book, at times, feels like looking at a 480p television show on a 1080p high definition television set, but with 1080p lettering somehow grafted on top of it.

Maybe I’m just getting older and my eyes more tired, but I’d like to see more sharpness to the work. I’m not sure if that’s possible anymore. If the art is still available, could it be rescanned? Is there some Photoshop filter or artificial intelligence application somewhere that could read the pages and sharpen up the lines, maybe even make them darker?

Or was this all the artist’s intent? Did Schuiten not want the colors to compete with the lines? Did he want it to look like a cohesive whole, where the lines were a necessity, bit not the star of the show?

Recommended?

In the end, you can choose to read this book in one of two ways: Take it on face value and object to its objectification and titillation, and just think it’s a half-baked book overall. Or, see it on a second level as a story with some social commentary and humor about it. See it as a bit of a parody of such stories, but one that still takes itself seriously while making some aspects of the story look silly. See the weaknesses in the story where they are, more in the plot mechanics and characterization, and not in the surface level parts.

Most of all, see it as another steps in Francois Schuiten’s growth as a comic book artist. Soak in all the amazing imagery and lose yourself in another world.

It’s Francois Schuiten, so yes, I recommend it. You could start here, theoretically: The book is self-contained. It has a great high concept. It’s a complete story. But there’s much better Schuiten works out there.

Your enjoyment of this book will depend on your openness to something different. There is a three act structure at the heart of the book, but it’s well hidden behind the exploration of the world. The pacing is different from what you’re used to in your modern sci-fi action stories. And, of course, there’s all manner of gender commentary that one might want to read into the book. I think a reader’s reaction to the story will show us as much about the reader as about the story.

But Humanoids’ presentation of it is wonderful and the visuals are stunning throughout. Comics could use a few more good students of architecture in its ranks….

Now for the bad news: This book is currently out of print. There is no print or digital version of it I can link you to. The closest you’ll come is the DC publication, “Hollow Grounds,” which has a smaller physical page size (standard North American TPB) and bad reproduction values. You can find them on eBay pretty readily, though, which is the book’s main attraction.

If you’re ready for more, you can read my review of the third volume of “The Hollow Cities” now, also. The series ends in a very… symmetrical bang. It’s an OuBaPo book!