Yragaël & Urm the Mad

This lavishly illustrated import by Druillet (Lone Sloane) and Demuth, originally published in France in 1972, spews a mix of myth and psychedelia that recalls H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock. The opening declares, “Imagine. The Ocean Sphere. The Cosmic Viscera” and similar pronouncements with detailed drawings of monsters and deities. It is hardly surprising that the following story of Yragaël doesn’t follow a standard narrative format. Instead, readers are given vignettes of the doomed prince’s tale after the mad gods have unleashed their fury on the city of Cemeroon (“built of basalt, porphyry, marble, meteors, and flame”). The prince rails at the gods, joins the company of noble warriors, and, finally, makes love to a being that is perhaps both city and Sybil. The quest tale of their progeny, Urm the Mad, is more linear in form but just as mystically told, with Hindi-influenced imagery. Throughout, visuals unfold like Art Nouveau on a bad acid trip, with the limited, muted palette true to the book’s era of origin, heavy on the black. This deeply weird discovery awaits lovers of phantasmagorical fantasy comics. [em](Aug.) [/em]