Glacial Period h/c back

The first and finest of the Comics Lit / Louvre collaborations returns in a much classier, album-size hardcover on matt cream paper which really shows off the winter colours. There's a constant chill in the air and some of the skies are phenomenal.

Highly edifying as well as hilarious, the book follows an expedition consisting of one woman, some talking dogs and several men rife with rivalries as they explore the frozen wastes of the future before a giant structure which used to be the Louvre in Paris erupts through the ice and draws them down into its long-lost corridors.

Struggling to make sense of their discoveries, they get it all wrong. It seems we've lost more than our history - we've hit another dark age of art:

"How is it done? It's flat, yet you sense the depths. It's an avalanche. You can imagine its breath."
"It's a coded message, or a simple representation of their lives."
"Yes, it's a message meant for us. They knew they were doomed, hemmed in by the cold, and, since they didn't know how to write, they drew like children."

Yeah, well that particular painting was Louis Hersent's "The Monks of Saint Gothard" so nul points for accuracy there.

Other blunders include mistaking the ecumenical for the erotic, the pagan for the pornographic, and a mythical satyr for a real-life genetic anomaly. In fact they mistake all these individual exhibits for a single historical narrative - a graphic novel, if you will. Brilliant!