4 out of 5

The look and feel has been established; issue #3 is the most consistent Metal Hurlant yet in terms of presentation: it feels like our editors / curators (Jerry Frissen, Fabrice Giger, Amanda Lucido and Jake Thomas) know fully the type of tome they want to make and are delivering it. The selections all feel “right” and are nicely varied; the mix of old and new strips is good; and the basic pacing of text to art is nearly perfect.

If you sense me avoiding any absolutely glowing adjectives there, well, yes. Look: this is going to be a hard book to get perfect. It’s 250+ pages; it’s a lot of material to offer to a reader firstly, and then to let them sit with it for a few months. I absolutely approve of each issue having a theme – definitely key in larger anthologies like this – but that’s also going to add to your complexity, because we can tell when you’re just kinda trying to force a submission to match. “The monster within” is a pretty open-ended idea, but in a damning way: it conjures up something specific that can then be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Meaning that “monster” may bring up many different visuals, but it’s associated with a thing in some way: a person; a creation. Being a sci-fi leaning mag, Hurlant can pitch this more directly as aliens or something, but also Lovecraftian unknowns. However, flexing it to encompass tangential “monsters” – the potential monsterishness of motherhood or childhood, for example – gets tricky. And you can be narrow and say that the parent or offspring represents the monster there, but to me, it’s playing with the concept a bit. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing! …But should be done with some purpose to really make the theme sing, and that’s where this collection goes a bit astray: some stories read like titles that probably weren’t the best choice, but were close enough that the team decided that could fit under the banner if you squint.

Anyhow. Loads of different visual styles here, and divvied up well so you never get stuck in something you may not like for too long. Similarly, the writing styles are incredibly varied, and offer up that same balance (something more wordy, then something more visual-centric, etc.). The color palette for the spine / font is nice, though I feel like something darker could’ve been cool for the theme – but I’m getting way into subjectivity there.

Along those lines… Amanda Lucido’s writing – in a text piece, one of the author bio pages, and an interview – rather negatively stuck out to me. It’s a good thing that each editor has their own style, but the separation between Lucido’s and Jake Thomas’ approaches is drastic, and maybe this either needs to be shaken up more (like have other writers offering further differences) or streamlined a bit so it’s not so jarring. I’d also shorten the main text piece by a page or two – nine pages felt a bit too much; whether it was Lucido’s approach or just due to the (to me) bloated page space, we got most of the meat of the interview in like half that space. Six pages feels about right for a feature to me, though I’m admittedly using Judge Dredd Megazine as a reference, as I feel like they’ve found a good flow for their monthly mag.

Definitely some criticisms, but I’ll allow that they’re either very minor, or really getting into matter-of-opinion. Otherwise – so excited for this series to keep growing, as it’s just gotten more confident from entry to entry, and despite my nits, it really feels like this issue has turned a positive page.