Mister No: Hram Maja
story: Guido Nolitta, art: Roberto Diso
Originally published in Italy in 1976 in three separate issues of the regular Mister No series, no. 13-15 (June-Aug.) under the titles “Rio Negro,” “Ombre nella notte” and “Il Tiempo del Maya”; this Croatian collected edition was published in 2021

I decided to sample some of the material featuring another Bonelli Comics character I’d been curious about for some time. First a little background: Mister No was created by Sergio Bonelli (writing under his frequent pseudonym Guido Nolitta) and artist Gallieno Ferri. The series ran from 1975 to 2009. Mister No’s real name is Jerome ‘Jerry’ Drake, a US Army veteran who moved to Manaus (northwestern Brazil) right after World War 2, where he works as a bush pilot and occasional tour guide. This often gets him into all kinds of adventures and trouble, although generally he claims he just wants to live an unveventful life, working as little as possible and drinking and chasing skirts as much as possible.

In this book, he gets hired by two American archeologists, the elderly Prof. Warren and his research assistant Patricia Rowland, to take them deep into the Amazon jungles to find what they believe is a long-lost and previously unknown outpost of a group of Mayans who fled there from Central America. Mr. No hires a river boat and assembles a motley crew. Of course, as always seems to happen on archeological expeditions, there are some nefarious characters also interested in the professor’s quest, and they initially attack Mr. No in Manaus and later follow them into the jungle.

I found this a pretty by the numbers ‘jungle expedition’ story and honestly a bit bland. There are also quite a few chunks of the story where it’s just the characters sitting around and talking. The art by Roberto Diso, who apparently drew quite a few of the Mr. No adventures and is something of a fan favorite, is solid and serviceable but nothing I found incredibly remarkable. However, Mr. No seems to have been a pretty popular character in the Bonelli line, and has a pretty devoted set of fans here in Croatia. This story, by the way, has also been translated into English and published in the US by Epicenter Comics under the title “The Temple of Maya.”

This isn't quite European, but it's closer to Europe than any other thread here.

This is an audio story from the BBC World Service: Cairo in Comics

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct6chd - also www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct6chd

Modern Cairo is a crowded metropolis. The city’s ‘thousand minarets’ are now dwarfed by a new skyline of slick tower blocks. Modern highways fly over bustling kiosks where residents gather to smoke and buy soda drinks.

Inspired by the lives of their neighbours, playing out among mosques, high rise buildings and on busy streets, Egyptian writers and graphic artists, including Deena Mohamed, Shennawy and Mohamed Wahba bring their thousand-year-old capital to life. They tell the stories behind their own books and comics - Tok Tok, Shubeik Lubeik, and A Bird's Eye View over Cairo. And how today, the city’s dedicated festival Cairo Comix has become an annual destination for artists and fans from around the world.

Not a lot came out last month, but I got some new comics this month:

Brigantus by Yves H. and Hermann: Brigantus is a Roman legionnaire, but despised by his fellow soldiers because of he's of Pictish descent. As the small group is under attack by Picts, his loyalty is doubted by most, except for a young soldier who has seen Brigantus save them time and again. Historical Fiction. Part 1 of 2.

We recently had a thread about older artist that still create great artwork and Hermann at 86 years old, should have definitely be on that list.



And two Pecau's:

Arcana (issue #5) is an older series that only now gets translated into dutch, even though it strongly ties into the series Major Arcana and The Secret History (both series are repeatedly referenced in this issue, so I will need to reread all three series in order at some point to make sense of it all). Urban fantasy series.
Mobius #2: With artist Igor Kordey, this is a much more focused as part 2 of a 3 issue story (I noticed that a lot of European series right now are going for shorter complete stories in 1-3 issues, see also Brigantus, and I quite like this development) Fantasy series where people who move to a different world whenever they die, but really don't think too hard about the mechanics of it (as people keep injuries they received shortly before dying). Kordey gets to create some weird creatures for this one (including basically a walking penis and a walking vagina monster, so definitely mature readers only, but it's Pecau, so you probably already were not sharing this with your kids).

The sci-fi vampire concepts introduced in Nathan Never spilled over into its spin-off series Legs Weaver. Vampirism became a legislated phenomenon, with vampires seeking government permission to infect their family members so that they could live together forever. Interesting take on the whole Highlander "Who wants to live forever?" thing. But the resulting society of vampires also has their own intrigues, including vamp-on-vamp crime.



The Legs Weaver series tended to homage a different theme each issue. It might be MacBeth one month, or giant mecha, or vampires, etc. One issue was a complete homage to John Byrne's Alpha Flight comics, including a long-haired shaman with a magic medicine bag. His name was Duegiovani, which means "Twoyoungmen!" Plus there was a Sasquatch, a Talisman, a story involving the ancient gods of the Northern Lights, and more. They apparently weren't worried about copyright litigation; the language barrier made it unlikely they would be discovered in the short run.

Tigress Blanche 1. Au service secret du grand timonier
Tigress Blanche 2. Peau De Pêche Et Cravate De Soie
(originally published in the French language in Belgium in 2005; these Croatian editions published in 2008 and 2010)

Read the first two volumes of the Franco-Belgian series Tigress Blanche, written by Yann le Pennetier and drawn by Didier Conrad, mainly because someone gifted me a copy of the second book (so I checked the first one out of the library). This is apparently a prequel series to another Yann & Conrad collaboration called Les Innommables, as one of the characters from the latter, shaolin fighter and Chinese communist spy Alix Yin Fu, is the titular ‘White Tigress.’ These two volumes basically tell her origin story, when, some time in the late 1940s, she just completes her training to become an operative and is then sent on her first mission in Hong Kong.

And that mission involves trying to find information from the head of a local organized crime ring, which ends up being about a long-lost third American atomic bomb for the Chinese government. Alix has to to contend with British and, later, American intelligence operatives who are also trying to track it down, as well as a mysterious group of assassins who all wear mummy-like bandages over their faces.
The story is entertaining enough, as the storytelling style is pretty tongue in cheek. For example, the aforementioned British operative is Francis Flake (apparently a dig at Blake of Blake & Mortimer fame), a young, snobby, not-very-bright rich boy who lives with his controlling (and promiscuous) mother.

The art, which I mostly found quite nice, also has a sort of comical style – although the depictions of many of the Chinese characters often seemed like racist caricatures.
This is as far as I’ll be reading these for the time being, as only these first two books have been translated into Croatian (there’s seven in all), and none of it has been translated into English.

Looks interesting. Searching for samples of Teresa Valero's artwork, she seems to be using a different style in this book than in some of the previous things she's done.

Ljubav, zabit, rasvjeta
Krešimir Biuk, 2019

The title translates to “Love, backwater, lighting,” and it tells the story of Marko, the rather portly central figure in that cover image above, who owns a lamp and lighting fixtures shop in Zagreb, but then moves to the dilapidated house of his recently deceased grandfather in a small village in inland Dalmatia. He made the move because Mia, a woman he’s in love with and with whom he had a close but platonic relationship, told him “she’s met someone.” The story goes back and forth from flashbacks to his time and Zagreb and his current life in the village as he fixes up his grandfather’s house and gets to know his fellow villagers, of whom there are a grand total of nine and all of whom are quite elderly.

(an interaction between Marko and Luca (prounounced LOO-tsa), a nosy and judgemental granny).
Eventually, Mia shows up in the village together with her problem-prone younger sister, who’s bandaged and walking with crutches because she had recently been beaten within inches of her life by a pair of gangters (it’s a complicated backstory). Marko gets drawn into this whole situation, which necessitates a brief return to Zagreb.
I really enjoyed this – it has a mostly light-hearted tone, but still tells a story with quite a bit of emotional depth. Those who follow this thread regularly may be familiar with Biuk’s name, as he’s the scripter of the "Zagrebljuje" series I’ve been writing about in my reviews of the anthology series Strop (the most recent issue discussed just above), as well as the pretty recently published Kozmiči otpad. Besides being a great scripter, Biuk is also a very capable artist, and has done a number of ‘solo’ projects like this one, including a series of well-regarded YA comics. Of those I’ve read, this is my favorite so far.