Dungeon: Monstres 4: Night of the Ladykiller

This is the first book I’ve read in the long-running Dungeon series created by French masterminds Sfar and Trondheim. Despite being the fourteenth translated volume in the sprawling spoof saga which has veered out to five individual branches (Early Years, Zenith, Twilight, Parade and Monstres) detailing life and bloody death in this fantasy land making mockery of Dungeons & Dragons, I felt I hit the ground running.

Night of the Ladykiller contains two stories written by Sfar and Trondheim, one  illustrated by Yoann (who is the latest artist to take over the legendary Spirou and Fantasio books) and the second by Vermot-Desroches (in his first ever graphic novel). The stories star a parade of talking animals, which may kid you into thinking this is a children’s book, but when Horus the Sorcerer is besieged by females of all sort (pigs and birds and cats) claiming to be pregnant through his wily vulture charms, you start to wonder. And when the corpses at the mortuary are reanimated by necromancy most foul, and end up being chopped, disemboweled and otherwise mashed back to oblivion, you’re in up to your neck in carnage not suited for toddlers.

The second story, wherein the creature Grogro is trusted with – with hesitation – a mission to fetch some supreme beer made by curmudgeonly bunnies, runs off the rails early when, airborne atop his winged companion, Grogro gets hungry and removes one of the wings for a quick bloody snack. Thud. What follows entails possessed bunnies, wholesale slaughter, kidnappings, decapitations by mops, and buckets full of beer.

While the description may seem a tad grim, this is the funniest takedown of heroic fantasy this side of Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier’s Groo. It’s consistently clever, outrageous and absurd in just the right doses, carefully plotted to play with the tropes of the genre while twisting them to their own wickedly sinister purposes. Both of the artists in their distinctive styles manage to deliver equally entertaining results. The sharp, scraggly lines of Vermot-Desroches have the natural fluidity of a caricaturist, while Yoann’s painterly globs manage to run the gamut from cute to creepy with ease borne from talent boiled in technique.

I also expect that regular readers of the series will get a lot more out of the book than I did, knowing some of the background and the characters. But that just means I’ll get to enjoy it again after reading all the other books in the series.