ISAAC THE PIRATE: Volume 2: The Capital

This volume collects the third and fourth installments of the series by Blain, a French artist of the "New Generation" of European comics. In the first volume, Isaac Sofer, a penniless painter in pre-Revolution Paris, left his fiancée, Alice, to seek his fortune at sea. In this second volume, Blain shows a man changed by his experiences returning home. He opens the book with Isaac stranded on a ship near the South Pole watching his pirate crew mates, mad with fever, slaughter each other. He manages to escape with Jack Ransom, the only other survivor. Jack and Isaac journey together through the Caribbean, cutting throats, robbing houses and chasing women. The innocence Isaac possessed in the first volume is now long gone; his life has become as crooked as his newly broken nose, and when he finally returns to Paris, Alice is gone. Blain's drawing appears cartoony at first, but on closer examination shows a deep portrayal of human emotion. The drawings' moody color and sketchiness add to the pall of darkness that fills the book, and Blain's landscapes convey all the squalor of the places Isaac visits. Blain's Isaac is an everyman who, exposed to the debauchery of the pirate life, willingly becomes an accomplice in the crimes he once shunned. (Mar.)