Cyberspace, video-game world, virtual space have long inspired fiction writers. Since Ubik by Philippe K. Dick, they question the interaction between fiction and reality and question the deep nature of this other world. In Rev, Edouard Cour offers a captivating narrative and visual experience by following a neophyte projected into a virtual world.
Lost in the matrix
In the more or less near future, the virtual world of Rev has imposed itself. Designed as a video game, it develops from the dreams of its users. This gives it this unique appearance where dreamlike figures, human fantasies and troubled spaces rub shoulders. This also gives him strange rules where abstraction, poetry and artifice mix. The heroine, Gladis, has just decided to take the plunge and connect with Rev. A neophyte, she does not understand the rules. But she meets MR_iO, a connoisseur of the game who decides to accompany her and guide her on her first adventure. Her help is welcome because Rev offers a destabilizing setting where the player passes from the corridors of a large one, to a station station and then to a dark forest. However, each place offers him challenges with no apparent links between them. Like Ulysses our player will try to progress in this universe with disturbing codes without suspecting the real motivations of her ally. 
Rev : a disconcerting graphic atmosphere.
This comic strip is a work that will not please everyone. Indeed, Edouard Cour has chosen to give a soul, a style to his daring work. Indeed, to depict this virtual world, he chooses a drawing that mixes sketch, print and nervous features. This mix of genres builds very hypnotic boards that perfectly support the purpose of its story. He insists a lot on the plant that comes to colonize this virtual world. A stylistic audacity that allows itself all formal explorations. This risk-taking plunges his story into a dreamlike atmosphere sometimes eyeing the absurd. Indeed, Rev is the receptacle of dreams, fantasies, unconscious players. Those build a destructured universe. The rules, the geography seem to be constantly changing. Objects with very rare exceptions offer destabilizing shapes. All this is embodied by avatars conceived as suggestions where bodies, faces seem unfinished. 
When Alice meets Ready Player One
Immersing herself in an unknown universe, Gladys finds herself in the skin of Alice diving into a strange simulation. Indeed Rev is presented as a classic video game with its experience points, its levels. What destabilizes are the trials. They do not make sense a priori, seem futile or disconnected. The P.N.I have styles that change completely as soon as you change rooms. As for the challenges, it's up to Gladys to try to understand the logic. Like Alice, she seeks rationality in a world that is the exact opposite. The story is also centered around a strange ester egg that must lead Gladys to grow, progress and gain abilities. Rev then reads as a variation around the video game that looks a lot towards Ready Player One. An entity guides our heroine to the depths of a strange simulation. From the hotel to the forest to a sumptuous palace reminiscent of Angkor, Gladys faces trials that highlight both her qualities as a player and as a person. And when she leaves the game, the reader asks the central question: Did Rev change Gladys? 
A Digital Odyssey at Joseph Campbell
To limit Rev to a declination around virtual worlds would be to miss the depth of the story and its multiple references. Edouard Cour first takes up in a modern form the myths of Theseus and Ulysses. He has already tackled the rereading of Greek myths in his previous work Herakles. Here, he quotes two classic figures of this pantheon: the breadcrumb trail and the trials of Ulysses. Gladys confronts wizards, devouring monsters (close to the cyclops) and is guided by a player, a true deus ex machina. Which seems to decide to make him fulfill a predestined destiny. This echoes the second inspiration: Joseph Campbell. This American writer studied the myths of the world in the 1940s. He showed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that they all respected an identical structure that he called the mono-myth. He based his thesis on the analysis of the hero's journey, a key passage in legendary narratives, which obeys the same narrative scheme regardless of the myth examined.But Rev multiplies the references to this founding story until a breathtaking finale that shakes the neurons while drawing a brilliant connection between the writing of the myth and the video-game writing. These final pages give a new meaning to this album reminding us of the immutable foundations of heroic writing. Rev is a unique, iconoclastic and bold proposal around virtual worlds. Graphically sumptuous, scriptedly inspired, this album is an artistic UFO to discover at Glénat editions.
