[Review] Axolot volume 4, a best-of graphic

The Axolot series continues… The Patrick Baud blog is in its fourth volume and is still published by Delcourt.

Visual fireworks

While leafing through this volume, the reader may be confused by a graphic and stylistic mix. It is not a story but different authors tell stories by letting their style express themselves. Graphically, our gaze wanders between the very abstract drawings of Yannick Grossetête, more realistic drawings of Aseyn and even a very manga story of Baptiste or very humorous comic with Fabien Toulmé.

Reality surpasses fiction

We travel through time and the world but all these stories have a real basis. This very good idea makes the whole series even stranger. We come across surreal events, places or lives, although real: a Japanese survived two nuclear bombs, the discovery of the ancient mechanism of Antikythera… The reader is sometimes happy to leave a narrative – as with the rather insipid third account of Océane Sandon and other times disappointed that the correspondence arrives – as well as all the short accounts on these absurd wars. However, these realistic adventures form a poetic rambling. The Emu War is part of a fun series about silly wars. The bucket war is just as funny and even more so with the boloss version dialogues.

Who writes what?

The stories have a very variable length with a single page a very good long-term narrative like The Viking Wanderer. The set of stories is of quality – Dear friend who parodies The Longest Day or the animal images of the cabinet of curiosities quite disgusting. Each story begins and ends with the author of the blog. These texts question: is this his only contribution? Delcourt sometimes credits him as a screenwriter.

Necessarily uneven, we close this volume with pleasure because a large part of the stories is confusing.It is a very pleasant trip on the blog but it is complicated to know how the paper edition brings a plus. However, Patrick Baud manages to gather an interesting new album and exhaustion is still not present at the end of this fourth volume.