Thorinth #5

The fifth and final volume of Nicolas Fructus's Thorinth series arrives with a cover that plunges you headlong into a writhing mass of strange, fleshy creatures — round-bodied, wide-eyed, and piled atop one another in a vertiginous, almost overwhelming heap. Le Grand Tout ("The Great Whole") promises exactly what its title suggests: a sense of countless beings merging into something vast and unknowable, rendered in Fructus's distinctively tactile, sculptural style. Published by Les Humanoïdes Associés in 2007, this concluding chapter looks like a fitting, ambitious close to one of French genre comics' more quietly fascinating sagas.