In the future, a family tries to survive the onslaught of the police, but how to explain that the mother is in love with a robot?
Nathanaëlle: the future is not rosy
As inequality continues to grow, humanity is split in two. Underground, the poorest hide after a nuclear apocalypse. Life is boring and all that's left to pass is food seasoned with tranquilizers or virtual sex. But, in fact, nuclear destruction is a lie orchestrated by the richest to get rid of the problem of overpopulation. Indeed, on the surface, an elite enjoys life… Especially since it has no end. Advances in medicine allow the richest to reincarnate in other human or robotic bodies. A young woman, Nathanaëlle, risks upsetting this false balance. This worries view: is the world really torn between a selfish elite and a mass obsessed with sex and food? 
The future is very funny
Indeed, the previous summary masks a very important part of the story: humor. The political parable fades in front of a farce that shakes everything up. The screenwriter Charles Berbérian sprinkles the scenes with surreal dialogue. And any resemblance to existing facts is clearly not accidental. Totally incompetent police officers confuse Nathanaëlle with another individual. In the first family, the father offers his son a coffee but, as he is a robot, the beverage comes from his insides. This son, Melville, is the shame of the family because he is vegan. Relationships between fathers and children are a real problem in this future. Nathanaëlle has just fled the basement which endangers her father's political position. The latter really does not need that while he may not be chosen for his sixth term, and therefore die. The acid portrait of the family composed by Berberian is colored with greater sweetness by the final revelation.
A future major duo?
Visually, the authors propose the paradox of old-fashioned science fiction. We think of steampunk – Nathanaël wears a corset – or the robotics of the 50s. Fred Beltran's style is impressive by the density of the drawing and the variety of different materials. The simple layout, however, allows for smooth reading. The many bonuses at the end of the volume proposed by the publisher Glénat specify the process of finding the cartoonist. The reader discovers the different graphic techniques used, the studies on the characters, the passage from the sketch to the final page, the urban landscapes and finally different portraits. As Berberian tells in the preface, the two artists come from very different genres but they first met at a rock festival in Haute-Savoie before launching much later in the creation of this joint work. Nathanaëlle , through tasty dialogues, splendid landscapes and a design shaking up the past and the present is a success. This album may certainly appear as a humorous break in the career of the two authors but the reader having taken a lot of pleasure in this story still hopes to quickly read a new album of this new duo.
