Les Cités Obscures
| Les Cités obscures | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Created by |
François Schuiten Benoît Peeters |
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| Publication information | |||
| Publisher |
Casterman NBM Publishing Editions Flammarion Alaxis Press |
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| Formats | Original material for the series has been published as a strip in the comics anthology(s) À Suivre magazine and a set of graphic novels. | ||
| Original language | French | ||
| Genre | |||
| Publication date | 1983 | ||
| Number of issues | 11 | ||
| Creative team | |||
| Writer(s) | Benoît Peeters | ||
| Artist(s) | François Schuiten | ||
| Creator(s) |
François Schuiten Benoît Peeters |
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| Reprints | |||
| The series has been reprinted, at least in part, in Dutch, English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. | |||
Les Cités obscures (literally The Obscure Cities, but initially published in English as Cities of the Fantastic) is a graphic novel series set on a Counter-Earth, started by the Belgian comics artist François Schuiten and his friend, writer Benoît Peeters in the early 1980s. In this fictional world, humans live in independent city-states, each of which has developed a distinct civilization, each characterized by a distinctive architectural style.
The full series is available in most Western European languages (in French and Dutch by Casterman, in German, Spanish, and Portuguese by local publishing houses) and other French speaking countries (in francophone Canada by Editions Flammarion).
While the first five books of the series had been published in English by NBM Publishing, they discontinued publishing the series in 2008, with the editions going out of print.
After a successful kickstarter campaign in mid 2013, Alaxis Press (an imprint of Atomic Vision Entertainment, Inc. and named after the "sulphuric" Obscure City of Alaxis) were able to fund a complete official English-language edition of The Leaning Girl (1996; volume 6 of the official series) and Leaning Mary (1995; spin-off picture book). The Leaning Girl is slated for release in February 2014, with The Theory of the Grain of Sand to follow in November 2015.The Leaning Girl received a 2015 Eisner Award nomination as Best U.S. Edition of International Material.
Alaxis Press has also stated that they plan to release the rest of the untranslated books (including all rare spin-off materials), before going back and releasing new editions of the books previously released by NBM Publishing.
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 Pilote magazine that his older brother introduced him to, with René Goscinny, Morris, and André Franquin among his early favorites.
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Wikipedia