Graphic novel series by Schuiten and Peeters
The Obscure Cities (), first published in English as, variously, Stories of the Fantastic and Cities of the Fantastic, is a bande dessinée series created by Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters. First serialized in magazine format in 1982, the series has been published in album format by Brussels-based publisher Casterman since 1983. New installments of the series were published throughout the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2020s, with full-color, partial color, or black-and-white artwork, as well as photo illustration. The artwork of the series is distinguished by Schuiten's realistic rendering of diverse contemporary, historical, and imaginary architectural styles.
The series is commonly labeled as steampunk, based on frequent appearances of anachronistic technology, storytelling and visual traditions of the scientific romance era, and its retrofuturist parallel world setting of imagined cities and cultures inspired by Jules Verne's literary depiction of Europe in the late 19th century. However, diverging from steampunk conventions as well as science fiction and fantasy in general, the setting is neither a speculative world nor an alternate history, but rather a "plausible" world for readers to "relate to", as Peeters has emphasized. "The Obscure Cities" has no unifying narrative, instead telling a series of unrelated stories, which have spanned genres such as pseudo-documentary, travel literature, psychological drama, and political satire.
Taking the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album in 1985 established "The Obscure Cities" as a prominent work of Franco-Belgian comics. The series has received analysis from literary and artistic scholars, and both authors are active in art, literature, and film projects in Belgium and France.
Background.
Born in Brussels to a family of architects, Schuiten had many relatives, especially his father and brothers, who were instrumental in what he has termed "Bruxellisation", the demolition of historic architecture (typified by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, who worked in Brussels at the turn of the 20th century) in favor of anonymous, low-quality modernist office and business buildings. Bruxellisation would become an important part in Schuiten's and Peeters' 1950s childhood memories of the city, and Schuiten's artstyle would become influenced by Horta's Art Nouveau designs.
Schuiten was brought up to study architecture by his father, both in university and early on at home. Meanwhile, his older brother, Luc, introduced the young François to Franco-Belgian "bandes dessinées", with René Goscinny, Morris, and André Franquin among his early favorites. Though Schuiten recalls his father's distaste for comics illustration, he was influenced by his father's evocative architectural drawing style, adding skies and figures rendered to suggest atmosphere and stories (as a sales tactic while visiting prospective clients).
In 1968, Schuiten and Peeters became friends while attending Catholic school, and the two worked together to write and illustrate a student publication. Ten years later, they reunited in Brussels and resumed their creative collaborations. Peeters, who was an aspiring novelist at this time, set aside those efforts for the comparative financial safety of the comics industry.
Around 1980, as an established graphic novel artist published in "Pilote" and "Métal Hurlant" and a number of standalone albums, Schuiten began drafting a parallel world of vintage architectural splendor reflecting his childhood memories of Brussels, a world which can be reached primarily through remaining buildings of these bygone times. In the fiction of Schuiten's setting, Bruxellisation is postulated as an ongoing effort to suppress knowledge of this parallel world.
In 1982 the first "Les Cités obscures" album, "Les murailles de Samaris", began publication as a serial in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine "À Suivre". Owned by Casterman, the monthly periodical marketed comics as literary works, serialized in complete chapters (rather than comic strips excerpted from forthcoming albums, as established by Casterman's earlier magazines). As a result, Schuiten and Peeters produced ten to twenty pages of story at a time for publication, before later parts of the story were finalized.
Styles and themes.
Schuiten's artstyle utilizes realistic line art, emphasizing outlines and flat colours according to the Belgian ligne claire tradition, but also incorporating tonal techniques akin to engraving, with heavy use of hatching and cross-hatching. His detailed, multi-step processes incorporate sketches, storyboards, and extensive visual research, which suited "À Suivre"'s serialization schedule. In 2019, Peeters acknowledged that such time-consuming art production no longer fit current comics publishing; subsequently, the next entry in the series was an illustrated book rather than a comic.
Peeters has defined the "Obscure Cities" world according to philosophical concepts: it is a spatiotemporally paradoxical world (where objects may contain themselves), where natural orders conflict with each other, which resists coherence and is defined by its internal differences. Influential ideas cited by Peeters include Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, Jacques Lacan's theories based on Borromean rings, and Sigmund Freud's description of the uncanny.
A recurring theme of "Obscure Cities" stories is resistance against absolutist rules, which are often imposed by political powers. The protagonists, who are sometimes "doubtful" and "weak", are driven to search for another world or for a different way of life, though they are not always successful in their journeys. None of the stories are resolved by confrontations against villains; antagonists and characters who commit wrongdoings are not ultimately central to the plots.
Various commentators, as well as Schuiten himself, have identified visual and theme influences in "Les Cités obscures" from as diverse works as those by Verne, Winsor McCay, Franz Kafka, René Magritte, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Victor Horta, Henry Fuseli, and Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Books.
In Belgium and France, Casterman publishes all albums in the series. From 2017 to 2019, Casterman also collected all existing albums in four complete volumes. Most, but not all, albums have been published in English, some multiple times: first in serialized form in "Heavy Metal" and Dark Horse Comics' "Cheval Noir", then as complete albums by NBM Publishing and IDW Publishing. The French Casterman standard editions and published English translations follow.
Other Casterman publications.
These works were also published by Casterman under the "Cités obscures" branding. They do not have conventional narratives and do not use the comic book format. All are collected in Casterman's complete "Cités obscures" volumes.
Related works.
These works were not published by Casterman.
"Le Mystère d'Urbicande" was written by Belgian author and "Obscure" fan Thierry Smolderen (under the pseudonym "Professeur R. de Brok"), purports to be a scientific essay bent to debunk the events of "La fièvre d'Urbicande". The text is heavily annotated in emotional handwriting by Eugen Robick, the main character of "La fièvre d'Urbicande" who is now locked up in Brüsel's Sixth Hospice, the city's mental asylum. Schuiten contributed the book's illustrations under the pen-name "Robert Louis Marie de la Barque" (whereas the French word "barque", meaning "barge" or "rowboat" in English, translates to "schuiten" in Dutch).
The volume "Voyages en Utopie" (2000) presents the ongoing and completed work carried on by these two authors, in parallel with the "Cités obscures" series. Another book Schuiten and Peeters collaborated on in reference to "Les Cités obscures" is "Les Portes du Possible" (2005).
Worldbuilding.
The world (or "continent", according to the authors) of the "Cités obscures" forms a disparate grouping of cities located on a "counter-Earth", which is invisible from our Earth because it is situated exactly opposite it on the other side of the Sun. A map illustrated on the final page of "Les Murailles de Samaris" first hinted at the extent of this alternate world, and a full world map shown in the opening pages of "La Fièvre d'Urbicande" labeled many more city names. Next, "L'Archiviste", an oversized poster book, illustrated many of these cities in a series of decontextualized images. Some of the images from "L'Archiviste" were revisited in later albums or stories, while others remain unexplored. In 1996, "Le Guide des Cités" was published, presented as a guide book which catalogued the cities of this world as tourist destinations.
Although these books are similar to spinoff media used in transmedia storytelling in media franchises, "Les Cités obscures" departs from such conventions by keeping its fictional universe "open" and "ad hoc" in nature. There are no central characters or locations, and no overarching narrative; gaps between stories of individual albums leave intervening events to the imagination. Commentary on the series has also emphasized the absence of a bible for the setting.
The openness of the "Cités obscures" setting has allowed readers to participate in worldbuilding, especially after the authors introduced the notion that travel between the two worlds is possible by means of "gates" ("portes") called "Obscure Passages". These are mostly to be found in buildings and constructions similar or identical to each other on both planets, whereas the distinct architectural style of a structure makes it a potential candidate to harbor an "Obscure Passage" to an "Obscure City" whose distinct style it resembles.
The Internet has contributed to creation of false documents in the "Cités obscures" setting. On websites such as "Web of the Obscure Cities" (which is no longer online but is documented on AltaPlana.be, an online encyclopaedia for "Obscure Cities") and "Office of the Obscure Passages", Schuiten and Peeters present alleged reports, often illustrated with photos and drawings, claiming accidental crossings over into the world of the "Obscure Cities" via "Obscure Passages", or by so-called "Obscurantists" who have been seeking "Obscure Passages" for years (compare "Obscurantist", a term based upon the "Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum", aka "Letters of Obscure Men"). The real authorship of some of this material remains unclear due to the use of pseudepigrapha.
Some of this worldbuilding material is incorporated into the "Cités obscures" publications. The authors claim that, after creating the character Mary von Rathen in "Le Musée A. Desombres", they received correspondence from an unknown person identifying as the character, first by mail and later e-mail, which invented new details of the "Cités obscures" setting from a first-person perspective. In "Le Guide des Cités", Schuiten and Peeters directly incorporate assertions and quotes from this correspondence, even where the claims contradict published material. Though the source of the letters remains unknown, Schuiten and Peeters deny authorship.
Multimedia.
Schuiten and Peeters have incorporated the "Obscure Cities" into other media.
Films.
Drafting and development of the film "Taxandria" and its accompanying graphic novel adaptation began between Schuiten and Peeters as early as 1988. Benoît Peeters had collaborated with director Raoul Servais before on a documentary entitled "Servaisgraphia" on Servais's unique animation style that was released in 1992. Subsequently, Schuiten served as production designer for the Belgian fantasy film "Taxandria" (1994) directed by Servais (starring, among others, Armin Mueller-Stahl). In the "Obscure Cities" series, at times characters refer to the vanished city-state of Taxandria which was accidentally removed from the planet during a failed scientific experiment.
A common theme in steampunk-influenced "Les Cités obscures", Taxandrian clothing and technology appear to resemble Victorian times on our earth, Taxandria's architecture is reminiscent of Schuiten's trademark phantasmagorical architectural fantasies, and another feature the film shares with "Les Cités obscures" is a bloated absurd, Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
A graphic novel adaptation of "Taxandria" was published by Schuiten and Peeters one year prior to the film's official release under the title "Souvenirs de l'Eternel Présent: Variation sur le Film "Taxandria" de Raoul Servais" (Arboris, 1993, , ), also including production background information on the film. In 2009, this book was entirely redrawn and published as a "Cités obscures" title.
A setting of "La fièvre d'Urbicande" appears in the 2012 Canadian science fiction movie "Mars et Avril" by Martin Villeneuve, based on the graphic novels of the same name. As a matter of fact, François Schuiten agreed to have a 3D model made out of his futuristic auditorium, for a scene taking place inside the Temple of Cosmologists. The director had this image in mind when writing his books, a few years before Schuiten joined the team as production designer. Before the shooting, even the extras were chosen to look like the characters in the comic book.
"Urbicande.be".
In 1996, "Urbicande.be", the official website of the "Obscure Cities" went online, soliciting fan accounts of their own experiences in search for "Obscure Passages". The response was so overwhelming that Schuiten and Peeters were able to expand their online activities into a network of in-universe sites, mainly branching from the URL "ebbs.net" of their official "Obscure" magazine called "Obskür", where many amateur reports, illustrated by photos and Schuiten's drawings, and various mysterious "Obscure" artifacts can be found. Along with these, a number of conspiracy theories are explored, regarding authorities of our world intending to prevent the spread of knowledge regarding the parallel world and destroy various