Hermann Weather

It's nearly always bleak here on the far edge of the east of England. That's how it feels to me. Even in the summer, even in a long hot summer, the mornings can be glorious and clear and sweltering and, absolutely guaranteed, by the afternoon, the skies will have closed in and the rains will be dribbling down. It's something about living on very low ground while being surrounded by the sea on two-and-a-half sides. Weather swirls over and around us. Some years ago, while walking too and fro across lonely concrete walkways above the A11, wandering from one side of the bypass to another in search of unwandered fields, my wife exercising two dogs and myself, we saw a fearsome storm blow up from the north towards us. An hour or so later, that storm was literally circling above us, and, then, as our mixed-species party slogged back home, the storm too turned back in the direction it'd come from, and travelled back rumbling above us, as if to make sure we stayed cold and wet and weary. Our very own storm-partner for an exhausting-the-dogs-and-husband walk. That's how the east of England often feels to me. The weather closes in on you and it will follow you if you try to escape. Bleaker than you might expect, and consistently so, too.

But wherever I am, even here, I always like to think about the comic books that the weather and landscape around me remind me of. It's not that seeing comic books reflected in the real physical world around me makes the comic book stories more real to me. Oh, no. It’s the other way around. It's that the world around me that becomes more real if it's like a comic. Comic books are, as must already be sadly obvious, usually far more intense and immediate than reality to me. Certainly, they are mostly more interesting. The world would often quite pass me by, leave me distant to and disconnected from it, if it wasn’t often quite similar in one way or another to somewhere Spider-Man once fought The Tarantula, or whatever.


But the kind of comic books I've always read aren't often particularly good with portraying the weather or the landscape. (Great on muscles, even if they’re not actually where real muscles go on a real skeleton, strong on clenched fists, acceptable on basic skyscraper architecture, poor on weather and landscape.) There are exceptions of course: Will Eisner's depiction of rain in his Sprit stories was so remarkably evocative that Michael Chabon used "Eisner" as an adjective to describe a downpour in his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Clay": Howard Chaykin made the snowdrifts and snowstorms in American Flagg's "The Blizzard of '32" as chilling and oppressive as the tension in that story demanded of its’ setting. But the fact that these few examples come to mind would seem to argue that they're the exceptions and not the rule.

And even if super-hero, crime-fighting, space-cowboy comics were good on weather, they're rarely, if ever, set out here, in the bleak east of England. So, as I wandered across sodden fields this morning, all mud and yellow-green grass, all bare trees lurching at arthritic angles, all bleak bleak bleakness, I was for a moment quite lost for comic book inspiration.

Then I realised that this was Hermann weather. Nobody in comic books has ever, in my experience, evoked the harsh truths of a north European winter as Hermann has. There's no sentimentality in his work, no pretence about rural living being somehow more moral and grounded and pleasant than city dwelling. The medieval countryside is a hard, hard master to the peasants and their masters in "The Towers Of Bois-Maury", Hermann's most brilliant series. He immaculately achieves the incredibly difficult task of compelling the reader’s fascination with his imagined past without romanticising his period to the degree that anyone sane person would want to imagine going there and acting out a protagonist’s role. There are reasons, perhaps, if you're of that mindset, to want to have lived on Dune, or Middle-Earth. Hard worlds, but full of enough heroism and comradeship and spectacle to incite wishful thinking to the wisty-minded. But Hermann's lost long-ago France is just too true, too real to be a suitable venue for a heroic life. In the best sense of the word, his past in completely banal. It's muddy there, and cold, and dirty, and, well, in many facile ways, it's not unlike the East Of England this morning, really. It’s as if he actually went out and found out what the countryside and the seasons actually looked like, and in doing so disproved Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “reality” as “the nucleus of a vacuum”. Absolutely not, Ambrose. Reality is the cornerstone of a damn good comic book.


Today's world, as I trudged onwards, was specifically made more real for me by Herman's second story in "The Towers Of Bois-Maury" series, called "Eloise De Montgri". It's set at the end of winter, with some promise of spring on the horizon, and it deals with a fearsome band of criminal peasants looting their way across the countryside. Titan Books published it in March 1989, and to my knowledge it's one of only two books in the series translated into English. (I have a third, where my ignorance of French has reduced me to pouring over the pictures and trying to use an old French-English dictionary. I haven't done so well with the words, but it's beautiful, and terrible, to look at.)

So, today's weather was "Hermann Weather", and because of Hermann, it was a world that looked far more than just bleak to me. The world looked real.



It is a shame and scandal that a review of Amazon.co.uk reveals apparently no Hermann comics currently in print in the UK. Most second-hand copies of his work are expensive too, but there are a few reasonably priced books all well-worth picking up and treasuring

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