Story

Story Information
TitleLe cimetière des géants
Number of pages7
ScenarioAndreas
DraftsmanAndreas
Context Information
AlbumPassages
AlbumRork - L'intégrale 1
SeriesRork
Magazine PublicationTintin/Hello BD (fr); Kuifje (nl) (1981, number 38)
Magazine PublicationKomiks fantastyka (1989, number 4)
Comments
from the article "The fantastic worlds of Rork (1984)":
The composition of the page
Andreas uses increasingly stranger looking pages in the course of the stories. He uses page layouts we have only seen at Crepax, like pages with oblique pictures, or full of small fragmentary images. One can find very beautiful pictures of Rork. Let's take the first two pages of Le cimetière des géants as an example. The first page offers us a view of the room. We look through the beams of the ceiling into the room. We can see books everywhere, and Tanemanar and Rork are just going outside. The second page consists of six page-wide pictures below each other, in which we come from high above Rork and his master, going down, while approaching the two persons, and then, still descending, move away from them again, until at last we find ourselves far below Rork and Tanemanar. Across this page you could, so to say, draw two diagonals: the camera that moves from the upper left to the lower right, and the persons moving through the wood from the lower left to the upper right.
This is not only tightly scheduled and esthetically sound; it is also - and that what important in a strip - very functional. At the last picture the two persons approach from the woods to an abyss, into which they will descend shortly. Through the fast lowering of the camera the reader is already standing below, making the abyss appear to be very deep.
The same way we can look at the next pages in the same story, in which Andreas draws huge monsters (large picture), followed by a descending Rork and his companion (small pictures, read from top to bottom), followed by the beast breaking through the ceiling (vertical picture, read from bottom to top). Experimental, indeed, but remarkably well readable, and thus well thought through.