3 out of 5

Okay, okay: my desire to read all of Dungeon in story-chronological order and not publishing order – sort of a short-circuiting in my OCD – has likely failed with volume 2 of the pre-Dungeon ‘Early Years’ collections.  With Volume 1 I was able to get by with the gist, appreciating Sfar’s and Trondheim’s truly idiosyncratic style and sensing where dots of details would likely pay off with better understanding of the lay of the land via further reading, but Volume 2 is very much not an open-armed affair, its latter half not the kind of “and here’s how the Dungeon was created” step-by-step my hand-held American reading sensibilities might’ve expected.  In trying to assess the story strictly from a structural point of view, it feels very cluttered, so there exists the possibility that I’ll come back and change my mind if / when I continue on my Dungeon path and reread The Early Years.

The subtitle is undoubtedly accurate, though, as volume 2 traces Hyacinthe’s downfall from innocent avenger to “What Can I Do?” assassin, very much ruined by what he feels are emotions he cannot control.  Again, it must be stated that, despite Christophe Blain’s loose art and the anthropomorphic characters, this is faaaaaar from being kid’s fare: violent sex and hefty emotions mingle with comedic character insouciance, and a many-years-later jump, at the tail end of Hyacinthe’s depression, is fueled by what me might extrapolate from his feelings toward Alexandra, and the actions those feelings led him toward.  I admittedly preferred part one of this collection, as it’s more linear, and has a recognizable path that pushes Hyacinthe further down his spiral, but the second half, After the Rain, is a very big and bold grappling of some complex relationships.  It ultimately becomes too big and bold, as the city literally collapses around our leads and it all feels like ten plotlines too many, and the speed with which things moves doesn’t quite sell the extremity of everyone’s actions (it’s like the big stakes of the story are a retroactive justification), but again, there’s a wonder if reading later volumes and then returning to this will make this sequencing make more sense.

Not necessarily a “fun” read all the way through, but an interesting one.