Kairos

by Ulysse Malassagne

Overview

In Kairos, French graphic novelist Ulysse Malassagne turns the typical damsel-in-distress narrative on its head. With stunning art, epic battle scenes, and unexpected plot twists, Kairos forces you to question where to draw the line between hero and antihero.

Nills and Anaelle are looking forward to their first night in their rustic cabin in the woods. But the couple’s idyllic vacation is suddenly thrown into turmoil when a strange flash of light bursts from the fireplace. A portal appears, and out of it spill dragon-like creatures that are armed to the teeth. They grab Anaelle and flee back through the portal, leaving a distraught Nills with a sudden decision: stay behind, or leap through after her?

He leaps. And that’s when things get really weird.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250209610
Publisher:	First Second
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	3 Months

About the Author

Ulysse Malassagne is a director, storyboarder, animator, designer, and comic book author. He studied animation and storyboarding at GOBELINS, a renowned art school in Paris. Kairos is his debut graphic novel.

Editorial Reviews

11/11/2019

Malassagne’s stunningly illustrated fantasy (his English-language debut) opens quietly, with bespectacled Nills and his enigmatic girlfriend, Anaelle, visiting her family’s cabin in the countryside. But after dinosaurlike dragon people teleport out of the fireplace to abduct Anaelle, the pastoral kicks into nonstop action. Anaelle is revealed to be a princess who fled to Earth from another world, now recaptured to face a terrible fate. Nils follows her to the realm of dragons, where his rage transforms him into a creature of unstoppable strength, and he slices a path to the palace where Anaelle is imprisoned—shedding his humanity, which had drawn Anaelle to him, along the way. (“Humans can experience love to the point of madness,” a dragon rebel explains.) The artwork, with cartoony characters hacking, slashing, and clawing their way through detailed otherworldly settings with deeply hatched shadows, suggests some of the better manga of the 1970s–1980s, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. But it also has a cool, loose French comics feel, similar to the self-aware ouevre of Joann Sfar. The result offers an unpredictable, deconstructionist take on the hoary premise of the hero rescuing the princess, with energetic art that goes a long way toward selling the trope. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly