The fourth book in Frédéric Brrémaud and Federico Bertolucci’s “Love” series will be available next month, but we’ve got a quick look at it today. The art is as gorgeous as the other three volumes, and the story is just as in depth (and downright depressing) as we’ve come to expect from this series. See below for preview pages and a review of Love: the Dinosaur.
As with Love: the Lion and the other books, this is a story without any dialog at all, it’s told entirely through paintings. In this book we’re following a much smaller dinosaur as it goes about its daily scrabble for survival, and you have to really concentrate on the artwork to get an idea of the story. In the end, though, the story is very straightforward (SPOILERS.) Life is hard, alliances last only as long as they’re convenient, and in the end we’ll all die anyway.
Cheery, right?
The artwork is of course what draws you in, rather than any kind of uplifting message. The panels are insanely detailed, with gorgeous splashes of color and amazing landscapes. The sight of a prehistoric savannah with hundreds of dinosaurs covering it from horizon to horizon is breathtaking, and the battle scenes between predator and prey are mesmerizing.
In the end, though, the series hasn’t really grabbed me. I love the art, but in both this and Lion the end of the story was abrupt, and kind of hopeless. And at least in Lion we had a tiny glimmer of something less dark, even if it was just a dying memory of happier times. Here, we don’t even see an acknowledgement of any relationship these animals may have had with each other, any kind of gratefulness or sadness at the end, which I guess is actually pretty realistic. They’re animals, so they’re not going to have human emotions or understandings.
It does make the title “Love” a little inaccurate, but at least the artwork is very pretty.