Review by C.J. Bunce
Everyone wants more. That’s a big reason for a new English translated edition of writer Benjamin Legrand and artist Jean-Marc Rochette’s 1995 French science fiction comic strip story, The Gold and the Spirit, The Tribute Volume 1. Because when creators’ works get adapted into a movie or TV series, there’s an assumption that audiences want to see what else its creators have made. Their graphic novel series Snowpiercer made Legrand and Rochette an international presence, and so delving back into their catalogue makes sense. So we now have The Tribute (available here at Amazon). An experimental book with a cult following, this graphic novel is a strange, dark journey that is clearly a product of the 1990s.
Where Snowpiercer had an intriguing story with frustratingly similar white-blue monotone visuals throughout, in The Tribute it’s Rochette’s artwork that stands out. The artist makes great use of stacked, thin, horizontal comic strip boxes, which somehow work despite being confining to the story Legrand is trying to tell. Juan Gavirio is a soldier in a space infantry searching out an energy source on a planet of, again, monotone colors–but these shift as the planet changes. A few hundred years in our future, Juan longs to be back on Earth. Creatures attack his team, and a bipedal alien form steps forward, selecting him to lead this narrative for the reader. In a shared experience with the alien there is an exchange of the minds, perhaps an exchange of empathy itself.
Juan becomes a target of his own people and finds the drive to complete a quest of sorts. Humanity is doomed. Earth is doomed. Everything is doomed. Juan focuses on an attraction he feels for a woman named Weaver, and together they maneuver realities and opposing factions, including a villain named Kirk. For anyone with a glimpse of sci-fi knowledge, use of the name Weaver for a woman who joins a platoon of men to investigate an alien base (who looks just like Alien’s Sigourney Weaver) is not just unimaginative, but it jars the reader out of the story. The name Kirk has the same impact. Before the story turns to the surreal (and inhabits the incomprehensible) it also evokes Ridley Scott and James Cameron’s world seen in their movies Alien and Aliens. Perhaps the story didn’t grab American readers on the heels of those movies because of this similarity.
Juan is another “Chosen One” archetype. He is written like the protagonist of Lifeforce, a sort of background player tapped for a greater role. The spirit elements of Juan’s abilities also might tap into the stuff of Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine’s status as Emissary. Humans are back as the “shoot first, ask questions later” variety as new alien encounters are concerned (so more The Day the Earth Stood Still than E.T the Extra-Terrestrial). So those familiar with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game world (both which came before The Tribute) will see this as familiar territory.
As with Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the story is subject to multiple interpretations. Readers will wish they had access to Legrand’s story notes to Rochette. The story lacks a “through line,” motivations of supporting characters, and clear explanations as to who, what, when and why–requiring the reader to guess what is happening in each scene. The first third of the book is really the best of the story. When Weaver arrives, seen in a sterile, remote facility like in THX-1138, it looks like something that should be adapted to film. But it slowly gets murkier, devolving into something closer to the Natalie Portman movie Annihilation, which is similarly cryptic.
A psychic pool/communication/transference scene involving Juan and Weaver is straight out of Philip K. Dick’s psionic character stories, most widely seen in the movie Minority Report. To the extent the story is about saving worlds (like moviegoers saw in Dr. Marcus’s Genesis project in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), the book has been compared to James Cameron’s Avatar, but there is really little to compare here (and a key character here is also named Marcus). As writer Legrand spins his science fiction ideas in and out, artist Rochette also taps familiar visual elements, but the elements never converge into a cohesive whole. A particularly questionable, even childish, choice is a planet called Secef, which is explained as being derived from the word “feces” spelled backward. Maybe the concept works better in French?
A big plus worth noting is that this translation is an improvement on the stilted English translation of Snowpiercer–there is never confusion here as to dialogue, although some of the word choices did not exist in 1995–see “asshat,” for example–which, although possibly fine as a future word, it’s inclusion must reflect an inexact translation of the source material.
Consider The Tribute a book for fans of French science fiction, Snowpiercer, and the works of Legrand and Rochette. It is available now in its first English edition here at Amazon.
