2 out of 5

I recently had reason to dive in to what defines “parody” – versus spoof, or satire, etc. It was helpful to understand parody as iterating off of something specific: taking an existing property / properties and trying to make your jokes based on that. This is why the Scary Movie series – and the era of similar comedies it kicked off – were really (by my opinion) lame parodies, especially when held to the holy standards of, say, Airplane!: just repeating the scenes from some other source, but maybe in a funny voice and with a body fluid added, doesn’t actually parody anything.

…Similarly… while I think there’s a certain type of fantasy media that revels in randomness (think Adventure Time), just being random is not, in itself, very interesting. And taken to an extreme – make a whole project out of that – does not make for a very good story.

Cue Azimut, which tries for a whimsical sense of the absurd, but also summarizes its own damnation on the back cover: “(What) has the missing magnetic north got to do with it all? None can say.”

Spoiler alert: extend this mentality to nigh every detail within the Statix HC collection, which looks to have initially been five separate albums in the original French printing. And while I do find some of the bits and bobs amusing, and the art stuffed with some great acting and imagination, it’s also an incredibly frustrating work that reads like an incredibly indulgent Hitchiker’s Guide style of tale, where it’s all just gags, and not much story. “The North Pole has disappeared!” is the headline; but also time has stopped for some folks; but also there’s a war between a country of all short people and the tall world; but also there’s the perpetually sought after Marnie and her coterie of clockwork animals; but also there’s a character who appears at the same time as both an old man and a child; but also there’s a deus ex machina that literally relies on randomness, just so author Wilfrid Lupano can have even more reason to not effectively tie any of these things together.

And I don’t mean to say there aren’t any links to be drawn between these things, to an extent, but none of it feels like it stems from the story itself; none of it is really that interesting, because the rules can be – and often are – rewritten on the next page, or on the same damn page.

As sensory overload, and especially if you think all women characters should be drawn with gigantic bubble boobs, the book is at least a pretty joyous visual thing. Jean-Baptiste Andreae fills the pages with amazing character designs (accepting that boob thing, which I thought was going to be at least kinda sorta part of Marnie’s “appeal” as the conquest of everyone’s desires, but, no, every chick just is super endowed in this world) and visualizes Lupano’s narrative one-upping concretely; the story may not be very immersive, but the drawings at least provide the opportunity for it to be. And Titan’s / Statix’s hardcover printing is handsome, with full bleed art, covers at the end, and a well-designed look (from Donna Askem) overall.

But the story. The preview pages that had me interested in the book are still interesting, just as any given 3-4 page run is interesting – often funny, often stuffed with what feels like world-building – but, as mentioned, none of this proves very consistent, especially the lore; you end up not really being required to have followed most of the elements, as they prove to be nonsense, and only really need to pay attention to… Well, no, I can’t even say that, for sure. I don’t think a single story thread here feels like it had a solid beginning or end.

I’ll allow for translation. While this reads cleanly, and without any French-to-English hiccups, I do wonder if there are some idioms or puns that maybe worked in French that didn’t port over, which could explain away some of the randomness. I dunno. But unfortunately, I’m rating it in English, and, well, see the above: even after a single chapter, Azimut proved to be a bit of a struggle, with only my curiosity if anything would resolve carrying me through, but my suspicion that that would not be the case proving true instead.