First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Europe Comics on Oct. 7, 2015

The central character in Blast, Polza Mancini, is a morbidly obese writer who resembles a snowman with a carrot nose. Most of the characters have noses that could pass for vegetables, or fingers, or bird beaks. The art seems to send the message that people are grotesque. Mancini is more grotesque than most. But Blast also makes the point that “the legitimacy of disgust as a reaction to deformity is a universal principle,” a natural law that causes abnormality to be a defining characteristic rather than one part of a complex individual. And how can someone like Mancini not hate himself when it is so natural for others to hate him?

The graphic novel Blast is Mancini’s story, as told to the police during an interrogation. But Mancini tells his story in own way, slowly relating the entire story of his life as the police impatiently wait for him to confess his crime. The key event, as Mancini tells it, is his exposure to the blast. He felt the blast at a low point in his life. In fact, the story of his life until that point is in black and white (mostly black, representing a dark life), but with his description of the blast, color appears. It is a transcendent, transformative experience. Then it ends, and the world is dark again. Dark and spooky, with massive blotches of black and trembling shapes in gray.

Mancini has a history of entering and leaving psychiatric hospitals, but in a story like this, the reader is asked to decide whether his perspective of life is any less valid than any other. Mancini maintains that society has no problem with individual decisions to alter bodies, sometimes painfully, with surgery and tattoos and piercings, but when people decide to change spiritually “through delicious intoxication,” they are seen as contemptible and unbalanced. A police officer say that Mancini is giving himself “poetic excuses” for being an irresponsible and destructive drunk.

Mancini has (he tells the cops) experienced life, lived without boundaries. He abandoned his wife and his job as a food editor to live the life of a bum, not necessarily choosing to be a bum, but choosing solitude.

Yet solitude is not so easy to find. In the woods, he encounters a group who live apart from society, a self-proclaimed Republic that wants him to join their community. That isn’t the life for Mancini. Yet it is in the woods, joined by a member of the Republic who appears whenever Mancini opens a bottle, that Mancini experiences a second, colorful blast. He perceives all; his awareness is complete. “I heard the inaudible, saw the invisible. There was nothing left to hold me down.” And so he begins to float.

At one point, Mancini muses that silence, like solitude, is a poetic invention. Living in nature is both terrifying and comforting. “There’s a mystery in nature … something you can’t force. It’s revealed only if you know how to wait, perfectly still, and it cannot be shared.” A good many panels are silent, in the sense that they are wordless, but they carry the story along as Mancini travels, observing the world in all its detail — the stray dog lifting its leg, the crumbling wall, the beetles on the forest floor.

When the police provide more facts about Mancini’s past, the reader is challenged to decide whether the police are correct in their view of Mancini, or whether there is any truth in Mancini’s perspective. Has he adopted a self-serving philosophy to avoid remorse or has he discovered a way to live with himself, a philosophy that might benefit others? Blast leaves it to the reader to decide, but since this is the first of four lengthy volumes, there is much more to this original and inventive graphic story. Fans of graphic storytelling, of philosophy, and of the macabre will all find something to admire in Blast.

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A grotesque man (but then everyone here is fairly grotesque, the most attractive character resembling an inexpertly shaved George RR Martin) is questioned by police about something bad that he's done, and begins to unfold his story, albeit in a digressive fashion which winds the detectives up something chronic. He talks about growing up fat, about the fear of disappointing his family, and the terrible relief he felt when the last of them died, freeing him to be a bum. This is only the first part of his account, so we still don't know exactly what his crime was, but I already feel more invested than I expected in his story, helped by the way in which Larcenet's art, for all that the humans are hideous, really captures the quiet beauty of northern Europe in the cold seasons, and of the wildlife that haunts it if you stop long enough to let them show. And then, of course, there's the blast of the title, the strange epiphanies which upend the protagonist's life. These are represented as intrusions of colour into an otherwise monochrome story, which wouldn't be that original – except that they're the crude crayon scribbles of a child. And that, oh that is fabulous. Like in James Branch Cabell, where our world is indeed the work of the gods...but of the youngest and most immature of them, intently engaged in an activity the more respectable deities consider roughly akin to making mud pies. The notion that our greatest mystics are being overwhelmed by the most minor and amateur expressions of the highest world; I love the audacity, the use of the comics medium to inject something which stands so much unpacking. Excellent work.

(Netgalley ARC)

Interesting graphic novel about a man who is being interrogated by the police and the strange tale he tells.

'Blast 1. Dead Weight' with script and art by Manu Larcenet is a strange tale of a man being interrogated by the police and how he got here. We don't find all that out in this first issue, but the journey is an odd one.

When we meet Polza Mancini, a very large man, he is being held by the police. Someone named Carol Oakley is in a coma and apparently Polza had something to do with it. The police interrogate him, but his story is strange and takes a while. He was a married man who gave it all up one day to live in the woods under a big tree, eat chocolate, and drink alcohol. When he meets a group of people living nearby in the woods, things change a bit. Throughout, there are touchstone moments that Polza refers to as "blasts" which are accompanied by images of stone statues like those found on Easter Island. Could one of these "blasts" be what led to his encounter with Carol?

The art is black and white and the characters are a bit garish with long noses like beaks and blotchy skin. Polza is just huge, in size and fat.

The story feels like it could translate into an interesting indie film. I'm curious to know more.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Europe Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

What is the Blast? Well, you're not going to get all the answers in this first volume of Manu Larcenet's series, even though it runs to some 200 pages, but Larcenet's scratchy expressionistic black-and-white artwork has many other attractions. It will take another 600 ages in three more volumes to get to the meaning of the strange life-changing event that Polza Mancini experiences, but what we do know fairly quickly is that it has led to him being held in police custody and investigated for what he did to Carol Oakley, a woman who is currently in an induced coma and on a ventilator in hospital. Polza's story has many unusual twists, absurdities and horrors to go through before we get any closer to understanding the nature of the Blast, and Larcenet's pacing and visual depictions of the journey make that a compellingly dark and intriguing story.

The police already know what Polza did to Carol Oakley, and Polza isn't denying it, but what the police commissioner wants to know is why. 38 year old Polza, an overweight writer of Russian origin who knows he has no particularly attractive qualities, is willing to supply them with the information they are looking for, but it's not that simple to relate. First Polza describes the situation that led up to the 'blast', his relationship with his father, his unsatisfying and self-hating life, and the attempted suicide that led to "a moment of suspension", a revelation and coming to understand one's meaning and purpose in life. Depicted in vividly coloured child-like drawings, Larcenet also latches onto the monumental image of one of the mystical Easter Island Moai statues as a means of imposing a visual representation of the impact the blast has on Polza, but it would also appear to have deeper significance for the direction Polza's life subsequently takes.

In this first volume of Blast, Polza hasn't yet found a way to get to his destination, he just knows that he has to completely abandon his old way of life. That first leads him to woods where he is invited to belong to a communities of social outcasts and outsiders, the Skin and Bones Republic, but Polza doesn't want to belong to any group and has a direction of his own to follow, even if it's not quite clear yet how he is going to get there. Nor is it clear just yet what he has done to Carol that leads to his arrest and interrogation, but the imagery, presence and force of the blast is still felt and re-experienced by Polza, putting him subsequently into a Psychiatric Ward, and it's clearly a force that is going to drive him beyond the boundaries of accepted social behaviour.

Larcenet's pacing and artwork is perfectly balanced the first volume of Blast. The story unfolds between Polza's interrogation in the present day, and the revelations he makes while he describes what has brought him to where he is. There's an appropriate balance between exposition in the dialogue and narration and the use of the artwork to capture a sense of things that can't be summed up as easily in words. This is not just related to the highly expressionistic and enigmatic use of images related to the experience of the 'blast', but also in beautiful large single page panels that show the town and countryside where this all takes place, oppressively dwarfed by vistas of menacing and mysterious skies, the clouds depicted in whirls and splashes of grey wash.

Certainly, the dark tones of the artwork, the scratchy lines and the exaggerated features of the characters captures the tone of the subject well, putting me in mind of some of surreal and disturbing grotesquerie of Nicolas de Crécy. It's quite different from the more colourful and cartoonish imagery you might have seen in Larcenet's hilarious 'Cosmonauts of the Future' books with Lewis Trondheim (also published by Europe Comics) or his work on Trondheim's 'Dungeon Parade' series, which is where I was first introduced to the artist. Blast however appears to be a work - a major work - that is closer to or at least a development of Larcenet's own style and sensibilities, and it's going to be interesting to see where he takes that in the subsequent chapters of the series.

At first glance this really doesn't seem to be the kind of graphic novel that is incomplete, concerning at it does a humongous writer who abandons his life for one in the woods and permanent intoxication through gin. He's infatuated with nature, and with Easter Island statuary – and he's being questioned by the police about a dead woman. The painterly style, 99.9% black and white, is again not in keeping with your standard part-work, but this BD from Europe will come at you in four books. On this evidence I can only hope to see the rest, for it's really quite intriguing – easy to follow yet mystical, mature yet not heavy, and really quite different from anything else out there. Four and a half stars.

This is an intriguing story about an obese man who leaves his wife, home and career, to go and live wild and free from the structures and constraints of society.

Something happens to him, but we dont know what. All we know is that he has committed a crime and has been arrested and is now being questioned by the police. As he begins to tell his story he slowly reveals who he is and how he has lived. All of this we hope will tell us why he committeed the crime and what the crime was, but for now we have to journey step by step listening to this unusual tale of a person who has taken himself beyond the margins of society.

The man just steps out of his life and wanders around drinking alcohol and sleeping rough. He ends up living in a forest until he becomes unwell and then he is eventually placed in a psychiatric home, but that doesn't hold him and after a while he is back living on the margins of society. We can sense that there is something dark about his story, and a side to him that we are not yet seeing.

The story drew me in from the beginning and the story is enhanced by the black and white graphics which add to the atmosphere of the story, giving it an edge and letting the reader know that something about this story isn't quite right.

This is book one in a four book series and it does an excellent job of introducing the main characters and the story but what the real story is remains to be seen.

Copy provided by publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

A fantastic graphic novel. The art style is dark and quick. Love it!