Schuiten's graphic representations and architectural styles within Les Cités obscures is, among other historical themes, heavily influenced by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, who worked in Brussels at the turn of the 20th century. An important motif is the process of what he calls Bruxellisation, the destruction of this historic Brussels in favor of anonymous, low-quality modernist office and business buildings. Coming from a family of architects, Schuiten had many relatives, especially his father and brothers, who were instrumental in Bruxellisation, an important part in Schuiten's and Peeters' 1950s childhood memories of the city. Schuiten was brought up to study architecture by his father, both in university and early on at home, while young Schuiten preferred to pursue his escape to the world of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées such as those he found in the magazine Pilote that his older brother introduced him to, with René Goscinny, Morris, and André Franquin among his early favorites. Around 1980, having become an emerging established graphic novel artist who had made himself a name publishing in Métal Hurlant and creating a number of standalone albums, Schuiten began drafting a parallel world of vintage architectural splendor reflecting his childhood memories of Brussels, a world which can be reached primarily through remaining buildings of these times gone by. In an ongoing attempt to prevent the spread of knowledge of this parallel world, mostly faceless authorities in our world increasingly have these buildings torn down, and in Schuiten's world this was the true reason for chaotic, headless Bruxellisation where functional and organic buildings were destroyed in favor of ill-planned, useless, and confusing structures such as ill-planned roads, detours, freeways, and anonymous office buildings that destroyed the organic fabric of a city and resulted in dysfunctional traffic and living routines.

Eugen Robick designs the perfect city until a foreign element invades, a grid of beams which grows to gigantic proportions, throwing all well-laid plans into disarray but somehow making everyone realize the errors of their ways...

The fifth release in Alaxis Press' The Obscure Cities series to be published by IDW brings the award winning graphic novels to readers in English with an all-new translation! Giovanni Batista is a third-class maintainer of the Tower. His section is deteriorating more and more by the day and he has not heard from any of his inspectors or fellow maintainers in months. He makes the decision to go to the base office to file a complaint. While using his chute, he ends up somewhere even higher than his level. He meets Ellias Aureolus Palingenius and the lovely Milena. Together with Milena, he tries to figure out the purpose of the Tower. He finally decides to Climb to the top. The Tower, presented in this new edition, is the fabulous story for the exploration of a deliquescent world, an epic fable to the dimensions of world-building, a fantastic escape full of paradoxes, simulacra, and pretense. Magnificent mastery, invention, poetry, this is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful jewels of the exciting saga of the OBSCURE CITIES.

French

Mr. Abeels runs a flower shop about to enter imagine, through the miracle of plastics, flowers that never fade! His novelty is snatched up by the ambitious city planners of an all-new Brusel. No more lack of hygiene! No more dusty old buildings! All is razed and enormous new skyscrapers are erected at blistering speed! Never mind the disruptions and uprootings of people¹s lives! Who needs to preserve and live in history? Hurrah for modernity! Abeels falls in love with a renegade woman who fights the extensive redesigns and ends up having to play both sides carefully... Another retro-SF city, full of classic European elements a la Jules Verne. This world has been so successful in Europe as to elicit a life-size roving exhibition recreating it, even metro stations in Paris and Brussels designed after it!

After a freak accident on the Star Express roller coaster, 13 year-old Mary Von Rathen begins to lean. Doctors can not help her, so she is sent by her selfish mother and hen-pecked father to a private school in Sodrovni. Mary escapes and joins the Robertson Circus where she remains for several years, until she hears from newspaper editor, Stanislas Sainclair, that a scientist, Axel Wappendorf, might be able to help her. Wappendorf is working on a rocket to reach a planet that could hold the secret to Mary's trouble. Meanwhile an artist, Augustin Desombres, has run away from the busy world and buys an empty building on the High Plains of Aubrac in the French countryside. He begins painting murals of strange globes. Now as a young woman, Mary decides to join Wappendorf in the rocket. On the alien planet, they discover an area with many globes where she has a chance meeting with the artist. Winner of the coveted Gaiman Award as the No. 1 translated foreign comic book series published in Japan in 2013, this story of perseverance and a young girl s search for love has been translated from it's original French into ten languages. Author and publisher Stephen D. Smith has now translated The Leaning Girl into English. It features an introduction by Karen Green, Graphic Novel Librarian at Columbia University.

Dans la belle et élégante cité de Brentano, l’agent d’assurances Albert Chamisso, fraîchement marié, souffre de cauchemars récurrents et terriblement angoissants. Qui plus est, le voilà victime d’une très curieuse affection : son ombre pâlit et prend des couleurs, comme si, symétriquement, son propre corps était en train de gagner en transparence. Et d’ailleurs, n’est-ce pas au fond toute sa personne, tout son être qui manque singulièrement de substance? Impuissant à guérir les maux qui l’affectent, rongé par le doute et profondément perturbé par ces symptômes de plus en plus envahissants, Albert perd pied : sa jeune et jolie femme l’abandonne, ses employeurs le congédient. Il ne lui reste plus qu’à s’abandonner à la clochardisation qui guette… C’est dans ces circonstances troublées, abandonné de tous ou presque, que l’ex-agent d’assurances fait la connaissance d’une jeune artiste, Minna… Avec en toile de fond les paysages urbains fantastiques et démesurés qu’affectionnent Schuiten, Peeters et leurs très nombreux lecteurs, voici un chapitre des CITÉS OBSCURES qui plonge au coeur d’une histoire très humaine, tout en sensibilité et en émotions. Élégant, raffiné, aérien, à savourer sans modération.

Le deuxième tome de LA THÉORIE DU GRAIN DE SABLE débute deux semaines après les premiers événements du tome 1, le 2 août 784. Débordé par l’accumulation des pierres dans son appartement, Constant Abeels fait appel aux autorités. Mais elles sont elles aussi submergées par l’urgence : des tombereaux de sable continuent de se déverser du haut d’un grand immeuble, depuis l’appartement où tout a commencé… Dans une profusion de décors urbains d’une richesse et d’une inventivité exceptionnelles, Schuiten et Peeters renouent avec les atmosphères inimitables du cycle des CITÉS OBSCURES, pour une intrigue prenante qui marie une discrète touche d’humour et d’ironie au souffle de leurs meilleurs albums…

Aim, un enfant d'une dizaine d'annes au crne ras, vit Taxandria, une ville en ruines, emplie de colonnes corinthiennes et de grands palais dserts. Suite un mystrieux cataclysme, les lois de "l'ternel Prsent" ont t promulgues Taxandria : toute allusion au pass et au futur y a t interdite, toutes les machines ont t bannies. Aim dcouvre un livre d'images qui relate ces terribles vnements. Il est boulevers par cette lecture et plus rien ne peut dsormais l'arrter. Parviendra-t-il chapper l'emprise sinistre du monde de l'ternel Prsent

Augustin Desombres fut-il un peintre pompier parmi bien d'autres ou un artiste essentiel de la fin du XIXe siècle ? Répondre à cette question est d'autant plus délicat que presque toute son œuvre semble avoir disparu. L'enquête que mène une jeune femme permet pourtant de retrouver de très étranges documents, dont une série de partitions d'une étonnante modernité...

French