Maybe this can become a thing… me writing about compelling weird shit coming out of Italy.

Detrocboi is a thirty-page self-published booklet from an Italian freelance illustrator who goes by the same name. Meant to serve as both a portfolio of his talents and a comic in its own right, Detrocboi is divided into three parts.

The first fifteen pages form two full-color short stories about a fantasy heroine named Peqotl. Then there’s a black and white six-page short story where the same person transforms into an Ultraman-like character to battle monsters resembling those in the famed tokusatsu series. (This story is available in its entirety on Detrocboi’s blog, as is a lot of other terrific drawings of monsters and crystals and crystal monsters.) The final eight pages of the booklet are comprised of full-bleed reproductions of Detrocboi art prints.

There’s a pervasive Japanese influence in his work, but it also stands independently on its own, with fantasy elements clearly culled from the deep realms of Detrocboi’s imagination. There isn’t much left for me to say other than this a weird book that’s cool to look at. I hope Detrocboi does more sequential artwork, though his prints are interesting enough to stand by themselves.

Detrocboi is available for online purchase here. You should bookmark Detrocboi’s blog and give his older posts a look, where he posts sketches and reviews other artists that have influenced him.

This is Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles Omnibus Volume 1, published by Dark Horse early last year.

The Dark Horse Omnibus series handsomely collects comics in glossy, high-quality paperbacks, at about eighty percent of the original printing size. Looks great on a shelf, fits nicely in the hand. Overall a very classy product, clocking in at around 400 pages in this case.

The Age of Reptiles collection is interesting for a few reasons. One: it’s about dinosaurs. Two: there are no word balloons, nor is the book narrated in any way. Three: it’s resoundingly well-drawn and drafted, communicating a great deal of drama and action in its pages without the use of the written word.  Four: it collects three stories published over a sixteen year period, which allows one to observe the evolution Delgado’s drawing style, as well as changes in the coloring of western comics.

1. Tribal Warfare (1993)

In Tribal Warfare, Ricardo Delgado painstakingly renders his landscapes and dinosaurs with as much detail as possible, hatching and cross-hatching elaborate textures that emphasize the reptilian nature of these terrible lizards. It looks like a lot of work, but succeeds at breathing vicious life into the story he’s telling, which concerns an escalating vendetta between a pack of deinonychus and a tyrannosaurus rex.

The coloring is tacky and gauche, and I mean that positively. It looks terrific! Dinosaurs parade around in absurdly flat, bright and contrasting colors. I don’t know how much of the appeal is derived from the added visual interest this brings, and how much comes from the nostalgic resemblance to toys and other books depicting dinosaurs in the early nineties.

2. The Hunt (1997)

The Hunt is similar to its predecessor in all ways. Delgado’s drawing style works to depict lush landscapes and bumpy, scaly beasts. An allosaurus feuds with a pack of ceratosaurs and all sorts of wanton violence and destruction occurs.

The most interesting difference is the enhanced use of coloring. Now not only are the dinosaurs bright, but they also gleam, as the growing possibilities of digital coloring allow for highlights and dappled pigment which almost always serve to enhance the art because these effects conform closely to Delgado’s lines. In addition, there’s a part of the story which incorporates big splash panels of clouds, and it would have been nearly impossible to present in an interesting way without the enhancements made to comics coloring by this period of time.

Credit must go to colorist James Sinclair. There was a lot of awkwardly colored mess in this period of comics history, but Sinclair keeps his gradients at manageable levels, and pays close attention to the anatomy of the figures Delgado has laid out. The result isn’t flawless, but mostly works. In the above image, for example, you can see how the highlights on the red dinosaur call a little too much attention to themselves, and would have been better off reduced.

3. The Journey (2009)

We jump twelve years into the future, and see a radical change in Delgado’s style. His linework is softer and more whimsical. He’s totally abandoned the crosshatching technique, though he’ll occasionally invoke that focused attention to surface details which characterizes his earlier work for some of the close-up panels. His lines now have a rounded, topography-like look to them.

At the same time, the scale of his compositions has grown. Whereas in earlier work we might see thirty or so dinosaurs in a single page, now there are often over a hundred! It works well for the story, which deals with a massive migration of many dinosaur species and the resulting culture clashes.

The same way a brazen color palette is characteristic of nineties American comics, The Journey reflects the muted, earthy tones that often prevail these days. There’s no denying the story suffers for it. The dinosaurs blend into the parched milieu, and Delgado’s inspired landscapes are less vivid than they deserve to be. Overall the comic is still an impressive work of art, but comes across as a bit of a misstep in light of Delgado’s earlier pieces.

Don’t let my comments about the differences in the three stories fool you, this is a terrific collection of visual storytelling that I’m delighted to own. I’d highly recommend Age of Reptiles to anyone with even a passing interest in comics and dinosaurs.

I first became a fan of Olivier Ledroit when I was a broke college student reading pirated comics. Low quality scans of his Pat Mills collab Requiem (an insane comic I totally endorse) lit my imagination on fire, and the artwork posted on theevilsnest.com had me looking at importation costs of the French editions. The way the comic was entirely painted, with a heavy sense of atmosphere and thematic color saturation, drew me in a manner comics rarely do.

My total lack of funds forced me to abandon the idea of importing the books, but I resolved to not actually read through the scans, because I knew their low quality would take some of the magic out of it. Shortly afterwards I forgot about it altogether.

A few years later I’m an independent working adult (blech) and I randomly discover Heavy Metal has printed two Requiem collections. I read ‘em and love ‘em. So I pick up every other Olivier Ledroit comic available in English: Sha, another Pat Mills collaboration published by Heavy Metal, and Xoco: The Obsidian Butterfly, the first of a four chapter series only available in a Heavy Metal Magazine back issue.

My desire to import his exclusively French work only increased. One in particular hung over me perilously: the self-titled Olivier Ledroit, an enormous 300-page hardcover artbook. Not much information about it exists aside from a French-language amazon.fr review. I held off on purchasing it for a long time, reasoning I’d be better off getting comics and looking at those instead of an art book filled with behind the scenes info I couldn’t read. But I eventually relented, took a chance, and was rewarded.

Ledroit's early work on the dark fantasy comic Black Moon Chronicles (Chroniques de la Lune Noire).

Concept work Ledroit did for the Heroes of Might and Magic game series. Never played it, but I'm pretty sure the art is better.

My crappy scans don't do this book justice... imagine this image but 26 inches long and in amazing clarity.

Olivier Ledroit is entirely dual-language, with the French and English written side by side. And it neatly covers every major project Ledroit has undertaken in mostly chronological order, beginning with his pioneering work on the dark fantasy comic Black Moon Chronicles (1989), and ending most recently with the ongoing Requiem series. Every chapter is underwritten with commentary by the people he worked with, as well as Ledroit’s own thoughts. And gorgeous full-page illustrations.

Short of having all of his work published in English, it’s perfection.

If you’re a fan of Requiem on a visceral level, I’d highly recommend this book. It provides a thorough look at Olivier Ledroit’s variedness and evolution as an artist, including all of his comics work (tons of which hasn’t been published in English), his covers for Phillip K. Dick novels, a chapter on bugs and fairies (an area he’s not well-known for, perhaps explaining the uncharacteristic cover of the book itself), and a bunch of other stuff, including various paintings.

I’m telling you about this book out of an odd sense of duty… I don’t know how many people who don’t speak French are even aware of its existence, or the fact it’s written in English. Ledroit’s personal website doesn’t mention it at all (and looks like it’s from 1995.) I haven’t seen it anywhere other than Amazon and sites that aggregate book information by ISBN number.