Les Cités obscures

Schuiten's graphic representations and architectural styles within Les Cités obscures is, among other historical themes, heavily influenced by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, who worked in Brussels at the turn of the 20th century. An important motif is the process of what he calls Bruxellisation, the destruction of this historic Brussels in favor of anonymous, low-quality modernist office and business buildings. Coming from a family of architects, Schuiten had many relatives, especially his father and brothers, who were instrumental in Bruxellisation, an important part in Schuiten's and Peeters' 1950s childhood memories of the city. Schuiten was brought up to study architecture by his father, both in university and early on at home, while young Schuiten preferred to pursue his escape to the world of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées such as those he found in Pilote magazine that his older brother introduced him to, with René Goscinny, Morris, and André Franquin among his early favorites.

Around 1980, having become an emerging established graphic novel artist who had made himself a name publishing in Métal Hurlant and creating a number of standalone albums, Schuiten began drafting a parallel world of vintage architectural splendor reflecting his childhood memories of Brussels, a world which can be reached primarily through remaining buildings of these times gone by. In an ongoing attempt to prevent the spread of knowledge of this parallel world, mostly faceless authorities in our world increasingly have these buildings torn down, and in Schuiten's world this was the true reason for chaotic, headless Bruxellisation where functional and organic buildings were destroyed in favor of ill-planned, useless, and confusing structures such as ill-planned roads, detours, freeways, and anonymous office buildings that destroyed the organic fabric of a city and resulted in dysfunctional traffic and living routines.

Approaching his friend Peeters, who by now had become a comic writer, about this imaginary world, Peeters infused his own philosophical ideas into plot lines he developed for the project, and in 1982 the first Les Cités obscures album, Les murailles de Samaris, began publication as a serial in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine À Suivre. Requiring a few revised editions of the early albums, the basic tenets and elements of Le monde obscure were laid down since the late 1980s.

Various commentators, as well as Schuiten himself, have identified visual and theme influences in Les Cités obscures from as diverse works as those by Jules Verne, Winsor McCay, Franz Kafka, René Magritte, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Victor Horta, Henry Fuseli, and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

The stories of the cités obscures appear in a series of graphic novels and related books, published by Casterman. Most, but not all, albums have been published in English, some multiple times: first in serialized form in Heavy Metal and Dark Horse Comics' Cheval Noir, then as complete albums by NBM Publishing and IDW Publishing. The books published in French so far below:

Spin-offs

Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir by Axel Wappendorf, a spin-off of the official series

Beside these "official" parts to the story, Schuiten and Peeters also collaborated, partly with other authors, on a number of works that were not originally linked to the series but that were set in similar settings, were linked to it later, and/or highlighted particular aspects of the Obscure World without being a traditional narrative.

1. Le Mystère d'Urbicande (1985)
2. L'archiviste (1987)
3. L'Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir’‘(1988);Casterman 1988 ISBN 2-203-90302-3
4. Le passage (1989)
5. Le Musée A. Desombres (1990: booklet and audio CD)
6. L'Écho des cités (1993)
7. Souvenirs de l'Eternel présent (1993), an adaptation of the film Taxandria (see below)
8. Mary la penchée (1995)
9. Le Guide des cités (1996), an illustrated tourist guide to the Obscure Cities
10. L'etrange cas du docteur Abraham (2001)
11. L'affaire Desombres (2002: booklet and 90-minute DVD)

The volume Voyages en Utopie (2000) presents the ongoing and completed work carried on by these two authors, in parallel with the Cités obscures series. Another book Schuiten and Peeters collaborated on in reference to Les Cités obscures is Les Portes du Possible (2005).

The world (or "continent", according to the authors) of the Cités obscures forms a disparate grouping of cities located on a "counter-Earth", which is invisible from our Earth because it is situated exactly opposite it on the other side of the Sun. A map illustrated on the final page of Les Murailles de Samaris first hinted at the extent of this alternate world,[2]^: 85 and a full world map shown in the opening pages of La Fièvre d'Urbicande labeled many more city names.[2]^{: 105–106} Next, L'Archiviste, an oversized poster book, illustrated many of these cities in a series of decontextualized images.[2]^{: 269–325} Some of the images from L'Archiviste were revisited in later albums or stories, while others remain unexplored. In 1996, Le Guide des Cités was published, presented as a guide book which catalogued the cities of this world as tourist destinations.

Although these books are similar to spinoff media used in transmedia storytelling in media franchises, Les Cités obscures departs from such conventions by keeping its fictional universe "open" and "ad hoc" in nature. There are no central characters or locations, there is no overarching narrative, and there are few or no connections between stories of individual albums. Commentary on the series has also emphasized the absence of a bible for the setting.[3]^{: 97, 100}

The openness of the Cités obscures setting has allowed readers to participate in worldbuilding, especially after the authors introduced the notion that travel between the two worlds is possible by means of "gates" (portes) called Obscure Passages. These are mostly to be found in buildings and constructions similar or identical to each other on both planets, whereas the distinct architectural style of a structure makes it a potential candidate to harbor an Obscure Passage to an Obscure City whose distinct style it resembles.

Both the authors and fans have created false documents in the Cités obscures setting. As early as 1990, Schuiten and Peeters enclosed "authentic" documentary or amateur CDs (Le Musée A. Desombres, 1990), and later, DVDs (L'affaire Desombres, 2002) to their print publications regarding the Obscure Cities. Likewise, on websites such as Web of the Obscure Cities (which is no longer online but is documented on AltaPlana.be, an online encyclopaedia for Obscure Cities) and Office of the Obscure Passages, Schuiten and Peeters present alleged reports, often illustrated with photos and drawings, claiming accidental crossings over into the world of the Obscure Cities via Obscure Passages, or by so-called Obscurantists who have been seeking Obscure Passages for years (compare Obscurantist, a term based upon the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, aka "Letters of Obscure Men"). The real authorship of some of this material remains unclear due to the use of pseudepigrapha.

Some of this worldbuilding material is incorporated into the Cités obscures publications. The authors claim that, after creating the character Mary von Rathen in Le Musée A. Desombres, they received correspondence from an unknown person identifying as the character, first by mail and later e-mail, which invented new details of the Cités obscures setting from a first-person perspective.[4]^: 5 In Le Guide des Cités, Schuiten and Peeters directly incorporate assertions and quotes from this correspondence, even where the claims contradict published material.[2]^{: 213–214} Though the source of the letters remains unknown, Schuiten and Peeters deny authorship.

Benoît Peeters had collaborated with director Raoul Servais before on a documentary entitled Servaisgraphia on Servais's unique animation style that was released in 1992. Subsequently, there is a loose connection between the increasingly multimedia series of the Obscure Cities and the Belgian fantasy film Taxandria (1994) directed by Servais (starring, among others, Armin Mueller-Stahl), where Schuiten served as production designer. In the Obscure Cities series, at times characters refer to the vanished city-state of Taxandria which was accidentally removed from the planet during a failed scientific experiment.

A common theme in steampunk-influenced Les Cités obscures, Taxandrian clothing and technology appear to resemble Victorian times on our earth, Taxandria's architecture is reminiscent of Schuiten's trademark phantasmagorical architectural fantasies, and another feature the film shares with Les Cités obscures is a bloated absurd, Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It is however under dispute among fans of the series whether Taxandria is truly one of the Obscure Cities due to a perceived appearance of a light-hearted children's fantasy movie to Servais's film.

A reinterpreting graphic novel adaptation of the movie Taxandria was published by Schuiten and Peeters one year prior to the film's official release under the title Souvenirs de l'Eternel Présent: Variation sur le Film Taxandria de Raoul Servais (Arboris, 1993, ISBN 90-344-1011-0, ISBN 978-90-344-1011-5), also including production background information on the film.

Schuiten and Peeters increasingly seek to transcend their world of the Obscure Cities from graphic novels into other media to create an entire universe, even though their comic albums remain the core foundation of Schuiten and Peeters's emerging multimedia franchise.

The full series is available in French and Dutch from Casterman; in German, Spanish, Polish (Manzoku and Scream Comics) and Portuguese by local publishing houses; in francophone Canada by Flammarion; and in Japanese in four collected volumes by Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions.

The first five books of the series were published in English by NBM Publishing; these went out of print in 2008. Alaxis Press (named after the "sulphuric" Obscure City of Alaxis) issued an English-language edition of The Leaning Girl (L'enfant penchée) in 2014. Leaning Mary, a spin-off picture book, was issued in 2015.[9][10][11]

In 2016, Alaxis partnered with IDW Publishing as the new North American publisher of The Obscure Cities, with Alaxis Press co-branding, and the original staff handling translation and editing.[12] IDW and Alaxis published The Theory of the Grain of Sand in 2016, Samaris in 2017, The Shadow of a Man in 2021, and The Tower in 2022. IDW then released The Fever in Urbicande and will release The Invisible Frontier in 2022, without Alaxis's involvement; however, the entire Obscure Cities series has been delisted from IDW's website prior to release of these books,[13] and it is not known whether the publisher is committed to completing the series.

The Leaning Girl received a 2015 Eisner Award nomination as Best U.S. Edition of International Material,[14] and The Shadow of a Man won the same award in 2022.

• 1985: Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Album – La Fièvre d'Urbicande
• 2012: Gaiman Award for Best Comic[15]
• 2022: Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material – The Shadow of a Man

• Various (Schuiten & Peeters among others; 1994). Schuiten & Peeters: Autour des Cités obscures, Mosquito (in French)
• Dossier FRANCOIS SCHUITEN, in Reddition, #32, 1998 (in German), Table of Contents & order
• Schuiten; Peeters (2000). Voyages en Utopie, Casterman (in French)
• Benoît Peeters (2004). The Book of Schuiten, MSW Medien Service Wuppertal (in English)
  • 2nd edition (2004), NBM Publishing
  • 3rd edition (2004), Casterman
• Schuiten; Peeters (2004). Maison Autrique – Metamorphosis of an Art Nouveau House, Ed. Les Impressions Nouvelles
• Schuiten; Peeters (2005). Les Portes du Possible, Casterman (in French)