Jérôme Hamon looks at our world, and moves it forward to a future where near-magical hover cars and holograms coexist with mixtures of old religions and actual magic. It’s a fascinating world of contrasts, a world of nature and technology, and it’s a world on the edge of destruction.
Franco-Belgium comics have a long history of producing great fantasy comics, often steeped in the continental history and traditional mythology that Tolkien initially drew from. “Nils: The Tree of Life” is a gorgeous comic and a fun read, and is exactly what you would expect from this lineage.
Written by Jérôme Hamon
Illustrated by Antoine CarrionIn natural world where goddesses watch passively, and old men scheme, and all the religions are jumbled, young Nils and his father set out to discover why their world has grown infertile. They quickly find themselves at the center of all the answers, and at the end of the world. “Nils: The Tree of Life” is a modern Norse fairy tale, a fantasy filled with technology, mythology, and magic.
Artist Antoine Carrion does a hard job of providing a consistent art palette across every scene, and the result is admirable, because this comic travels widely. His gauzy and colorful palette tours through ice flows, dense forests, dry savannas, a world of spirits, and goddesses walking among the constellations. He achieves that feat by slightly muting the colors, to make them flow better, but then emphasizing some stronger colors hiding in the natural world, like the golds in the farmlands and the greens in the night sky. These little touches make the comic more readable and less dreary. (It also make me wonder about the power of Photoshop, of how easy it is to bring these colors and highlights together to blend these palettes from scene to scene.)
There are nice clues hidden in the artwork about. In the first chapter you see a coat of arms for the Cyan kingdom painted on the side of a robot. The heraldic design is a scythe encompassing and stabbing a giant tree, Yggdrasil. Soon afterwards, when a few citizens of Cyan arrive to check on their downed robot, the forest is colored to be dreary, dark, and nearly dead.
The world of “Nils” is one of mixed mythology and religions, but it runs primarily on Norse mythology. The main story takes place in Sweden (I believe), with features the three Norn goddesses playing prominent roles. But the other religions have melted in. We also see some Norwegians saying a Christian prayer in Latin (“Laudate Dominum”) to a local goddess, Nils labels the forest spirits as yôkai, and he later recites a poem from the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh to help him focus and keep calm.
Jérôme Hamon is deliberate with his references, he’s finding connections in separate cultures and weaving them together. He’s careful with his names. Although the meaning of one name eludes me. Cyan. It’s the name of the warlike and technological nation at the center of all problems. “Nils: Tree of Life” was imported from France, and translated by Jeremy Melloul. I looked at the original untranslated comic to see if I could find a clue, but the name “Cyan” is straight from the original material. I don’t know what it means.
Some philosophy sneaks in too, in the form of Nietzschean lines, like “as long as gods exist, man will never be free,” which is said right before an old king is killed.
Nils is our titular hero, he and his father are the main characters in this story, and focusing on them is the best way to read it. There are dozens of other characters, but I had a hard time keep track of who is who my first time reading through. Eventually I settled on hair style and eye shadow as the key differentiator. Everyone’s styling might be realistic, but I wish Carrion had done tighter job on character design.
It’s a not a multi-cultural world, it’s world where the cultures have intermingled and departed again, leaving behind isolated villages with synthesized religions and beliefs. Including a belief in and knowledge of science and the scientific process. The whole journey begins with Nil’s father deciding that they need to investigate the science behind why their world has gone barren, why plants aren’t growing and women aren’t getting pregnant.
Continued belowThe reasons for barrenness eventually turn on a type of evil that permeates steampunk stories: evil men stealing the Earth’s green life energy. (Though in this case, the life force is called ethereum.) And this is the weakest part of this comic. It’s a trope. It’s the plot of the most popular Final Fantasy game. A group of evil men scheme to use industrialization to rob the world of its life force, and the ending is always a sacrifice to get the world going again. We can practically write it ourselves, the environmental metaphors are too easy. Jérôme Hamon lays this trope on top of the world of Norse mythology, especially the three Norn and Yggdrasil, but the structure doesn’t deviate much from what you’d expect.
But that problem doesn’t damage the enjoyability of the comic. If the world of comics can tolerate a thousand tired versions of capes and spandex, then it certainly has room for a new rendition on Norse mythology. It’s simply fun to see this old story play out in a fascinatingly weird steampunk world, in a future that’s balanced between recognizable and unpredictable.
“Nils: Tree of Life” is an excellent comic. Jérôme Hamon has carefully worked known stories on top of each other, and with the art of Antoine Carrion has produced an absolutely gratifying comic.
